


Geborgen

by liadan14



Series: pumpkin gnocchi verse [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Anal Sex, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussion of Racism, Discussion of the Relative Morality of being in the US Military, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Gunshot Wounds, Joe's family, Look these tags are a mess tell me what I should add in the comments, Love Language: Food, M/M, Minor Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman, Minor Andy/Booker, Minor Andy/Booker/Nile, Nicky's Complicated Family Feels, Nicky's family, Nile works in extraordinary rendition, Oral Sex, Pegging, Possible Character Death, Sex Toys, There is no infidelity in this fic, Yusuf Al-Kaysani's Unrelenting Dad Energy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:28:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 37,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28169268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: geborgen, German:1.      Adjective: safe, held, cozy.2.      Past participle of bergen: having been saved, having been rescued, having been hiddenIn which Nicky and Joe are slowly coming to terms with what has happened in the last few months and trying to look to the future together when Booker's past throws a very large spanner in the works.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: pumpkin gnocchi verse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2015747
Comments: 597
Kudos: 528





	1. pancakes

**Author's Note:**

> Enormous thanks to [lady-writes](https://lady-writes.tumblr.com) for doing a sensitivity read of this fic!

###  **after**

Last night, when he had seen Nicolino droop more and more as the clock ticked past eight and towards nine, when the boy, despite his assurances, curled up in angelic sleep so soundly he didn’t even notice being carried to bed, Joe had resolved that this would be the year he and Nicky would start seriously considering adoption.

This morning, Joe is less sure.

Nicolino is banging on a pot with a wooden spoon, demanding orange juice.

It’s seven thirty AM on January first, and Joe is the only adult in the house awake enough to give it to him.

It’s a travesty.

Joe is also uncomfortably aware of the heavy layer of fuzz on his mouth, the tightness in his neck and shoulders that will definitely result in a headache sooner or later, and the fact that his brain feels like it’s been hit by a truck.

These are the moments when he fondly remembers not drinking for eight years.

Hangovers have gotten so much worse.

He forces a smile for Nicolino. “How about we make pancakes for everyone, eh?”

“Pancakes!” Nicolino shrieks, and Joe has to hide a wince at the volume.

Nicky slumps into the kitchen when the first two pancakes are in the oven, held warm but not baking. The ladle is dripping batter onto the counter, and there’s a light dusting of flour pretty much everywhere. Cooking with small children is an adventure.

“Bless you,” Nicky mumbles, making for the orange juice that Joe pressed with his own two hands, because past Nicky and past Joe thought it would be nice to have freshly pressed orange juice on the first day of the new year. Past Nicky and past Joe were foolish and optimistic about their own stamina.

“You’d better do a lot more than bless me later,” Joe says in English, because Nicolino doesn’t speak it yet. “Coffee?”

“Love,” Nicky says gently. “I know you’re out of practice with hangovers, but I don’t actually want to have diarrhea.”

Joe eyes his own cup with sudden distrust. It was the only thing keeping him upright.

“You’ll be fine,” Nicky tells him, not a little condescending. “You didn’t drink that much.”

“My head disagrees.”

“That’s the lack of sleep,” Nicky yawns. “So, Nicolino,” he says, switching to Italian. “How do you like this new year?”

Nicolino eyes him suspiciously. “Is it really the new year?” He asks. “Because you all said you would wake me up at midnight if I fell asleep, but I don’t remember that.”

“We woke you up,” Nicky lies. “But you fell asleep again so fast you must have forgotten it, patatino.”

“Hm,” Nicolino says, frowning. “Were there fireworks?”

“So many fireworks,” Nicky tells him.

“Then it’s a good new year,” Nicolino decides. “As long as there are pancakes soon.” He bangs his spoon on the pot again and Joe winces as he flips the third pancake.

Breakfast foods are very much Joe’s specialty. Nicky is undisputedly the cook between the two of them, but he isn’t much of an improviser. Joe is happiest when he has nothing but a bunch of ingredients in front of him and no solid plan. Breakfast is a good time for that, because Nicky is mostly still too out of it to want to make an effort.

When they cook together, Nicky has the recipe and Joe follows his instructions, or else they would drive each other insane.

When he’s cooking breakfast, Joe decides based on mood and whatever’s left over in the pantry from Nicky’s more adventurous culinary experiments and just goes for it.

“Did you make them fluffy?” Nicky asks, in English again, peering over Joe’s shoulder, once he’s found a less loud occupation for Nicolino.

“Yes, dear,” Joe says with a roll of his eyes. “I made them fluffy. You get to do the washing up.”

“That’s fair,” Nicky yawns again, jaw cracking. “Will you make me one with raisins?”

Joe shakes the packet in his face. “You are a godless heathen and I will put raisins in the last one so they don’t contaminate the rest.”

Nicky kisses his cheek.

“I am so glad,” Elena says as she stumbles into the kitchen, kissing her son on the forehead, “that he cannot understand you flirting yet. He would be unmanageable otherwise.”

“Mama, Uncle Nico said there were fireworks last night, and that I saw them, but I fell asleep!”

Elena flashes Nicky a deeply thankful look as she strokes her son’s hair. “That’s right, sweetheart. So many fireworks.”

He goes back to drawing on a spare pad of paper with Joe’s good watercolor pencils while Nicky starts making tea and frying up the turkey bacon.

“Mama,” he asks again, some minutes later. “What’s flirting?”

Joe tries to pretend he’s coughing, not laughing.

He’s not very successful.

Enzo is unshaven and owl-eyed at the breakfast table, holding onto his teacup with a death grip and trying not to fall face-first in his pancakes when Andy and Quynh arrive.

“Thank god for you two,” Andy mutters. “And thank god for food.”

“That’s what you get for drinking like a fish when you’re over thirty-five,” Joe sing-songs. His coffee has kicked in, even if he’s allegedly going to regret it later. He also has a significantly lower tolerance than the rest of them, and as such, he drank less and he’s suffering a lot less.

“Just shut up and get me an ibuprofen,” she says. He hands her the packet he’d put in the belly pouch his sweatshirt just in case. She shoots him a thankful look.

“We’re going to look at the boats today!” Nicolino announces excitedly as he marches in from the kitchen, clutching his plate with his pancake proudly.

Enzo groans.

Nicolino frowns. “Aren’t we?”

“Yes, of course,” Enzo says, sounding like he swallowed gravel. “I did promise.”

He and Elena exchange long-suffering looks.

Joe is just about to offer to go with them, to help out, because at least he’s functional, which is more than he can say for Enzo.

But then Quynh stretches her arms wide and says to Andy, “Not to sound like an old woman, but I am so thankful we only have to go next door and fall asleep on the couch today.”

Nicky sets the plate of turkey bacon down on the table just a bit too hard, and Joe knows he ought to stay home instead.

###  **during**

“You’re sure about this?”

Nile looks over at Booker, slouched in the driver’s seat. He hasn’t shaved since she met him four days ago. He’s wearing a beanie that makes him look even more rumpled than the button-up shirt that probably hasn’t been ironed since he bought it already does.

He absolutely reeks of whiskey.

She swallows hard. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m sure.”

He smiles humorlessly and floors the gas pedal.

###  **before**

Nile is wearing a glittery gold, backless top, a stupidly tight pair of black jeans and heels she had to practice walking on in her hotel room for half hour increments until she could trust herself to spend a whole night on them.

She feels weird.

Not bad, necessarily, just like she’s not herself.

Scratch that, obviously, she’s not herself. The whole mission brief was to be someone else.

It’s a test run.

In an abstract way, Nile knows that this is a make or break situation, that her future is riding on her being able to stomach this op. She just hasn’t quite been able to make that information sink in.

Maybe it will come later. It used to happen, that moment when she was sure she was doing the right thing, when she got the satisfaction of doing something and seeing the evidence that it had had a positive, beneficial effect on someone else’s life. Sure, it’s been about seven and a half years since she’s gotten to help dig a new well or deliver medicine to a hospital that needed it, but she kind of figured, the more complex the operations got, the harder it would be see the direct positive consequences. There are game plans at work that a marine wouldn’t be privy to, and it makes sense that things that seem like senseless cruelty at the time will have a more beneficial outcome down the line.

Indy had a cat, when they were little. It was a calico, and it was the sweetest thing most of the time, but when it had to go to the vet, it scratched and bit like nobody’s business, because it didn’t have the long-term memory to understand that the vet was going to make it feel better once it had its shots.

Nile’s not sure if she’s the cat or the vet in this metaphor.

Sometimes, she thinks she’s the syringe.

She fixes her lipstick in the mirror, blots it with a folded up piece of toilet paper and heads out the door.

The mark is sitting by the bar when she gets there. Intel has it, he’s here every weekend. If it’s true, it’s remarkably dumb for a guy Interpol has been chasing for ten years. Then again, if it’s true, it’s pretty dumb that Interpol hasn’t taken him in yet.

He doesn’t look like she expected.

In all the surveillance pics in his file, he’d been red-eyed, skinny, shifty. Kind of how you pictured a drug runner. The guy in the bar is huge. Whatever he was on ten years ago, he must not be on it anymore; he could probably take Nile in a fight, easy. That doesn’t give her pause; he may have her beat on physical power but she has a gun in her purse and eight years of combat experience under her belt. He’s been getting drunk at the same dive bar for the last year.

Still, her objective isn’t to cause a scene, it’s to take him in clandestinely, because Interpol has dibs but the US government wants him more.

Watching him rub beer foam out of his mustache with the back of his hand, Nile can’t say she knows why.

Still, she plays it safe. She makes laps around the bar, letting some guy with an undercut that makes him look like third-rate soccer player hit on her, queueing for the bathroom and then sitting with a girl she met there for a good ten minutes so they can continue their conversation, making sure she keeps an eye on the mark while she mingles.

When he catches her eye, she heads over, leaning against the bar to order a drink.

“Na,” he asks. “Öfters hier?” The words roll off his tongue pleasantly, a little smile crinkling the edges of his sad eyes, and Nile has to remind herself that this guy was an integral part of the heroin trail through the Balkans into France becoming essentially undetectable.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t speak German.”

“Oh good,” he responds in perfect English. “I’m very bad at it.”

“Now why don’t I believe that?” She asks, taking a long sip of her mineral water.

“Because you don’t know better, clearly,” he says, draining his beer.

“Can I buy you another?” She asks, gesturing toward the glass.

He looks over at her. She can’t quite read him, but she thinks he might be amused. “Sure,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”

Nile blinks, taken aback for a moment.

She was expecting a criminal, here. She’s met enough criminals that it shouldn’t be a surprise, that they need not be cruel in every facet of their lives. When she was in basic, she’d imagined it being simple and straight-forward: she would catch terrorists while they’re trying to blow up schools and murder civilians. In fact, more often, she has caught terrorists eating dinner with their families, and she has dragged them away from children screaming in fear, not of the person Nile is taking in, but of her.

But this isn’t Afghanistan. She’s not in a uniform, and he hasn’t blown anything up in a decade. Why shouldn’t he ask what she wants? He’s just a man, just like the last five men she’s taken in, albeit under very different circumstances.

“I’d like to share a drink with you,” she says.

One drink turns into three soon enough. Nile’s pretty hardy – has to be, in her line of work, it’s such a fucking boy’s club – but she doesn’t drink much while she’s on the job, and lately, she’s been on the job all the damn time. Her tolerance isn’t great, so at three beers, she leans in close to Booker – the mark – and asks him if he wants to get out of here.

He blinks slowly, doe-eyed, and says, again, “If that’s what you want.”

Outside, in the cold, she shivers in her backless top and he drapes his leather jacket over her. “Yours or mine?” He asks with a crooked smile.

Nile remembers her CO telling her, beforehand, that they wanted him alive however they could get him, but that it would reflect much more favorably on her if she could find his home base.

She leans her whole body against his, pretending to do it on purpose instead of stumbling into him, unpracticed in her heels.

“Yours,” she breathes against his lips just before they kiss.

She’s not at all prepared for how she feels when he settles his hand on her hip, for the bolt of heat that shoots through her when he slides his leg between hers. She’d known he was attractive, in an abstract, older-man sort of way, but the sudden knowledge that she might actually have sex with him makes her shudder in his arms.

It turns out, her body isn’t a syringe; her body is just her body, and she hasn’t been held in months.


	2. beer

###  **after**

Nicky hates few things about himself quite so much as what grief does to him.

Joe tells him it is because he has the luxury of clarity of emotions, at other times. It’s true that he knew very easily that he loved Joe, when they met, and that once he had put words to the feeling he found comfort in it. It is also true that he usually knows what he wants. It was how he’d known to leave seminary, how he’d known to stick with the academic track and get a Ph.D., how he’d known to even ask Joe out in the first place. It’s how he thinks of what to cook for dinner every night, to Joe’s never-ending amazement, because when Joe has to choose, he’s paralyzed into indecision and spends a good half-hour imagining how different foods taste before they can even go shopping.

Grief turns Nicky inwards.

He’s a practical man at heart. When you think something is ineffective or just plain stupid, why not say so? When you are happy, why not let your friends and loved ones know they have made you happy? When you are sad and hurting, how can you expect it to become better without addressing it? When you love someone, why not tell them you love them?

With grief, he has nowhere to put it.

The person it belongs to is no longer there to receive it, and so it turns itself in on Nicky and he struggles to parse it. It turns to shambles in Nicky’s head, flayed by constant reassessment and shattered into component parts.

“My heart,” Joe says, when the house is quiet at last, Quynh and Andy returned to the – to their apartment and Enzo, Elena and Nicolino out looking at all the ships in the harbor. “Would you like to talk about it?”

The unfortunate side effect of living as they do, wrapped up in each other, is that Joe can read his moods easily.

“No,” Nicky says. But Joe will accept his no, as he always does, so he adds, “And yes.”

Joe looks at him helplessly. “Well,” he says. “Would you like me to start clearing up breakfast and not talk about it, or would you like me to sit down here with you and talk about it?”

“I wish I knew,” Nicky admits.

They sit.

Eventually, Nicky asks, “Can you tell me how you feel?”

Joe sighs, not at Nicky, but at the weight of it.

“I hardly know,” he says. “It’s all such a mess, in my head. I am so very glad that Elena and Enzo and Nicolino are here, that all the pain of the last months has some small success to show for it. I am thankful they are part of your life again. I am glad that Andy and Quynh are so close now, and that they are together again. But all that gladness – it doesn’t…it doesn’t erase…”

He trails off, and Nicky sees the tears before they escape his eyes with a hitched sob.

“Remember last New Years’?” Nicky asks.

Of course Joe does, Nicky knows that. It’s half the reason they had even gotten so drunk last night in the first place, trying to keep their minds off the thoughts that won’t stop intruding, ever since it happened.

Joe laughs wetly. “It was so much sadder,” he says. “Andy and Quynh weren’t together and neither wanted to see us in case the other one was going to be here. My family was celebrating together in Paris and we stayed here because we were so worried about Booker being alone.”

“We went to that horrible bar he liked,” Nicky reminisces. “And we sat there, for hours. They only sold terrible drinks—”

“—just because you don’t like bitter beers—”

“—and he was so drunk by midnight we had to carry him back between the two of us.”

They both have to laugh a little at the memory. Booker had been totally out of it, his arms slung over both their shoulders to stay upright. It had been a struggle, because he was taller than both of them, but Booker was also an affectionate drunk, and he’d reiterated over and over again for the entire subway ride home how much he loved them and how sorry he was to be a burden.

“I miss him, Joe,” Nicky says at last, when the last trace of goodness the memory brings out has faded.

Joe wraps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him close. “I miss him, too,” he says.

“Is that all?” Nicky asks, cheek resting against Joe’s shoulder.

“No,” Joe admits. “I’m angry, too. I’m angry that he did this to himself. I’m angry he did this to you, so fast after you lost your father, I’m angry that poor girl lost her life, too, all for his bad decisions, and I’m angry at myself that I can’t seem to let it go. I want to be sad and miss him, but I haven’t gotten there yet.”

“I don’t want that,” Nicky admits hoarsely.

“Hm?”

“I don’t want to be sad,” Nicky says. “I want to be fucking pissed off at him, and I am. How dare he? How dare he do this to us? To Nile? To her family? They shipped her body home, Joe. They shipped a body that was too mangled to be recognizable to her family in America, all because some asshole she had known for less than a week couldn’t keep off the bottle when he knew he had to drive. It’s so _senseless_ , and I _hate_ him for doing it.”

He swallows heavily against the build of tears behind his eyes. He refuses to do Booker the honor of crying.

Joe lifts his head by the point of his chin to press a kiss to his lips.

There isn’t much else to say.

“So,” Nicky begins, when he’s gotten himself under control, when they’ve started on the washing-up because they’ll have to at some point. “You want to talk about children, don’t you?”

Joe startles, dropping the mixing bowl he had made the pancake batter in into the soapy water. “Am I that transparent?”

“Only to me,” Nicky smiles, although he privately doubts it. Joe is so very open, and Nicky loves him for it. And he’s watched Joe, these last two days, giving Nicolino piggy back rides up and down the stairs, losing at parcheesi mostly-on-purpose, having in-depth conversations about how cool elephants are.

Joe’s ready.

“I want to talk about it,” Joe admits. “I want to look forwards, with you. But it has been hard, these last months, and I’d understand if you need more time.”

Nicky presses a kiss to Joe’s cheek. “Life is short,” he says. “And I want to have everything with you.”

###  **during**

Nicky wakes up gasping. He had been seventeen in his dream, sitting in his father’s office, telling him that he was considering seminary school. Only then his jaw had unhinged and he had spilled out all the words he’d never said to his father’s face – _I’m gay, I’m gay and in love with a Muslim, what will you do about it_ \- and the whole room had gone red and flashing.

For a long moment, Nicky is disoriented, unsure what’s happening. He must still be dreaming, because the lights are still flashing overhead, but he’s not in the office anymore, he’s in his bed, slid down far enough in his dream that his legs are hanging off the end, knees bent awkwardly around the deadweight of a cat curled up on top of the covers like a cannonball.

The lights are coming in through the window, he realizes groggily. He’s awake, this is Hamburg, and the lights are flashing in through the window. He rolls out of bed and stumbles toward the window, lifting up the blinds.

Below, on the street, is an ambulance. Two men in full protective gear load a body onto a gurney and then return to the wreck of a car bashed into the storefront of the Edeka across the street for the next.

Nicky realizes it’s Booker’s car just as the police sirens grow deafening enough to wake up Joe.

###  **before**

Contrary to the entirety of his behavior at all times in his life, Booker isn’t actually stupid. If he were, he would have died a long time ago.

Ignorance is bliss.

No, he’s smart enough to know the young woman he’s kissing up against the window in the back seat of a very lenient taxi driver’s cab is probably not interested in him for any other reason than professionally. He’d felt her eyes on him in the bar, caught glimpses of her flitting around the room, not really there _with_ anyone, just orbiting closer and closer to him.

It was her posture that gave her away, ramrod straight.

That and the fact that he can see no other reason for anyone to pursue him like that except his criminal record.

Booker should have left as soon as he saw her, should have tried to evade her sightline and get himself out of danger. He should have gone home, set a pan full of fat on the stove and let it burn his entire apartment down with it to escape. God knows there’s enough incriminating paper to keep the fire going until the building’s foundations catch flame.

He’s thought about it more than once.

Despite being smart enough to know what he should do, Booker is precisely stupid enough not to do it.

He got sloppy.

He got comfy.

He got attached, and now thinking about Joe and Nicky’s cozy apartment burning to the ground just to save his own skin is so repugnant he can’t do it.

There’s nothing to be done about it, now, nothing except whatever the exceptionally pretty woman who introduced herself as “Nile” (as if that’s even a real name) wants.

So Booker does what he does best and plays dumb.

( _Fuck you_ , Adele had said, _fuck you and your big blue eyes, acting all innocent, take your bullshit and your drugs and get out of my house_ , and he had begged and pleaded until she let him stay.)

He kisses Nile like he’s mad for her – and what a hardship, to kiss a beautiful woman so far out of league it isn’t even funny – and pretends not to see her trip a little on her heels when they get out of the taxi. The lights are out in Joe and Nicky’s apartment, because they are old men at heart. Booker’s glad they don’t have to witness whatever it is Nile will do to him, one way or another.

She presses tight to him as he unlocks the door and he fumbles his keys, dropping them on the mat.

He mumbles an apology, feeling ridiculous.

Why hasn’t she arrested him yet? Or shot him? Or done anything but give him these little sly looks out of the corners of her eyes, like she’s still trying to get a read on him?

The way she draws in on herself, when they’re alone, together in his apartment, gives him pause.

Maybe he’s wrong.

Maybe he’s an idiot, and she’s just a girl who finds older men attractive. Maybe she has an absent father figure somewhere and wants to sublimate her feelings about that; maybe she’s on vacation and wants to have stories to tell when she gets back.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want,” he says. “I can make you a coffee and call another taxi, if you’d rather.”

She looks over at him, eyes wide, lips parted, and his heart thunders in his chest.

It’s possible he has wildly miscalculated this entire encounter.

“Let me just try something real quick,” she says.

The next thing Booker knows, he’s being pressed back onto his fold-out couch with her thighs either side of his hips, her ass settled snugly against his crotch. Her hands stroke through his hair and then pull his head back sharply by the short strands at the back of his head and he groans involuntarily.

It’s not that he didn’t enjoy kissing her before – he’s not dead, and he can’t stress enough that potentially being locked into some top-secret international jail might be worth it after having gotten to kiss her – but now, with her on top of him, with her hands guiding him how she wants him, it slides into sharp focus that no matter what else might be going on, she _wants_ him.

Or she’s at least good enough at faking it to fool him.

“You like that,” she says around a smirk when she pulls back for a moment.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

She presses into him harder, hard enough that the hinges on the sofa bed creak and give, leave him flat on his back with her spread out across him, kissing him senseless.

Christ, even if he does end this night with a gunshot wound, it will have been worth it.

“Did it work?” He asks when she pulls back next.

“Huh?” She asks, distracted.

“What you wanted to try.”

“Oh.” She pulls back a bit further, sitting astride him and staring down. “Not sure yet,” she says. “Kinda making this up as I go. Take off your shirt.”

He does as he’s told.

It doesn’t take her long at all to discover that he likes it when she rakes her nails down his sides, that if she squirms on his lap just right he’ll make noise, that having her hands tugging through his hair makes him shudder.

It takes him stupidly long to realize that he doesn’t like this.

His body has never exactly been his friend when it comes to warning him on time.

“Stop,” he says, wrenching his mouth away, “Nile, stop.”

She pulls back, arching an eyebrow at him.

“You’re not here for this, are you?” He asks. 

She tenses on his lap, and he can feel, exquisitely, the strength of her legs.

“Why haven’t you just arrested me? Or shot me? Or whatever it is you’re supposed to do?” He asks, because he’s an idiot and he wants to know even more than he wants her legs around his head. 

With a heavy sigh, she gets off his lap and lies down on the collapsed sofa bed next to him.

“Can I tell you a secret?” She asks.

He shrugs. “I thought you were going to kill me about half an hour ago. You can do what you like.”

“I don’t know if I want to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (sorry to leave you here but the next chapter will probably take me another week to post whoops)


	3. raclette

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: this chapter contains mentions of Nile's work in the military and discussions of race.

###  **after**

They have raclette again for dinner.

For one thing, Nicky’s not up for cooking for five, and Joe exhausted his creative energies on pancakes that morning. For another, the fridge is still stuffed with raclette leftovers from New Year's Eve, and the shops are closed anyway.

Enzo, who is fully recovered from his hangover after taking a nap on the couch with Nicolino, chops mushrooms, singing _La donna è mobile_ loudly and badly, largely because the title comprises the only words he knows.

Joe tosses the hairy ends of the spring onions at his forehead, but it only seems to encourage him.

“How is Luzia?” Joe asks him, in the hopes that he’ll stop mangling opera.

Enzo sighs deeply. “Where did you put the wine?” He asks.

Joe rolls his eyes. Italians. So dramatic.

“She is as she ever was,” Enzo says, somewhat more earnestly. “Always displeased with something.”

Joe doesn’t really know what to say to that. He met Luzia once, under the worst circumstances. Since then, he’s only ever waved awkwardly over Nicky’s shoulder when Nicky was having trouble with Skype and needed Joe to fix it.

Enzo sighs deeply, then stuffs the last strip of pepper into his mouth.

“We’re moving away,” he admits.

Joe sets down his knife and turns around. “Oh?”

Enzo runs a hand through his hair. “We’re going back to Siena,” he says. “Elena got a doctoral position. And I can work anywhere.”

Not for the first time, Joe remembers that he doesn’t really know what Enzo does. Something with IT. Why it’s always Joe fixing the Skype connection is beyond him. “So Siena,” Joe prompts.

Enzo shrugs. “It’s not Hamburg or anything,” he says, gesturing expansively, presumably to encompass the entire width of the subway map he still hasn’t understood after four days of studying it intensely. “But it’s a bit bigger. Nicolino will get a better education. Elena can do something she cares about. Only Luzia…”

“Luzia will be alone,” Joe intuits. “When are you going to do it?”

“After the wedding.”

Joe blinks. Talk about burying the lede. “She finally said yes, then?”

Enzo blushes up to the tips of his ears. “I asked Nicolò for his gnocchi recipe,” he admits after a long pause. “Good recipe, that.”

Joe tries not to laugh, but he doesn’t try all that hard.

“Shut up,” Enzo says with something approaching dignity, munching on more bell pepper. “Do you even know how nerve-wracking it was?”

“Proposing?” Joe asks. “I have an idea, yeah.”

“It was awful,” Enzo moans. “I spent all day cooking and thinking I could just pretend I wanted to do something nice for her if I lost my nerve, but she saw straight through me. Kept asking what was on my mind.”

“But you’d asked before,” Joe points out.

“Yes,” Enzo says, “and she said no.”

Nicky would never have done that to him, Joe thinks with some satisfaction.

Still.

“It is a uniquely terrifying experience,” Joe agrees. “I think I started crying before I even finished asking the question.”

“I was going to say so many more things,” Enzo says. “Like, that we can do it wherever, or just go to city hall, and that it’s okay if she never wants to get married. But I just couldn’t get them out.”

“Did she keep you waiting that long?”

“Nah.” Enzo wipes the knife off on a kitchen towel. “She said yes pretty instantly. It just took me a moment to process.”

“So the wedding…?” Joe fishes.

“Right,” Enzo says. “Well, we’re thinking summer. Elena will start in the fall, that gives us another half year with Luzia.”

“She has a lot of friends, no?” Joe asks doubtfully, remembering a dozen or so women in black at the funeral, none of whose faces he can actually recall.

Enzo shrugs. “Sure,” he says. “It’s not the same, though. And she adores Nicolino.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Joe asks.

Enzo grins. “Have you told Nicolò yet, how desperate you are to bear his children?”

Joe slaps him on the arm with the dishtowel.

“Come on, you reprobate,” he says. “Slice up the cheese. Or I’ll make Nicky go back to pretending you don’t exist.”

Elena confesses to the upcoming wedding over dinner, and has to bear Nicky’s joy at her news. Joe hasn’t known her long, but he knows enough to understand that she’s not one for emotional displays. Perhaps Nicky wasn’t, either, before he met Joe and became accustomed to them.

Either way, Nicky is thrilled. He drops his little raclette pan onto his plate with a clatter and stands to hug Elena, and then he’s getting out the shot glasses and the limoncello to toast to her happiness. Conveniently, he manages not to include Enzo in his congratulations even once.

With her limoncello downed, Elena looks over at Nicky once more.

“Nicolò,” she says slowly, while Enzo and Joe are distracted by trying to convince Nicolino that orange juice in a shot glass is the same thing as limoncello. “I need to ask you something.”

“Alright,” Nicky says easily, and Joe’s heart clenches.

What if she’s going to ask him to stay away from the wedding?

What if she’s going to say that Lucia talked her into doing it in a Catholic church after all?

What if she’s going to disappoint Nicky all over again?

Joe is poised to intervene, ready to do something, even if he’s not sure what, to defuse the situation, when Elena takes a deep breath and asks.

“Nicolò,” she says. “Will you walk me down the aisle?”

None of them can stop laughing or crying for hours after that.

Raclette is one of Joe’s favorite family meals for this reason: It can last hours. The little stove keeps going, and even when you’ve sat a few rounds out, there’s always a boiled potato or a slice of cheese left over to munch, always some other outlandish combination you can put into the heat and watch melt. There’s something pleasant, too, about getting to know your in-laws preferences this way.

Enzo takes to German absurdities easily, piling kidney beans and sweetcorn into his pan like it’s normal. Elena treats it like fondue, sticks to potatoes and maybe some meat, and she watched Nicky closely yesterday, how he pours little heaps of nutmeg and pepper onto his plate to dip the hot cheese into. Now, she does it the same way.

They tell stories, until late in the night, until Enzo’s put Nicolino to bed, about their shared youth, and this is what Joe was missing the first time they all met, all the ridiculous tales of Nicky as an awkward teenager from someone else’s perspective.

It warms his heart that Nicky is not as alone in the world as he had thought himself.

It has settled something, in Nicky, Joe can tell. Something he didn’t know was unsettled.

In all the sorrow this year has brought, Joe will always be thankful for that.

Especially when Enzo returns from reading Nicolino his bedtime story and settles down in his chair again and Nicky actually deigns to look at him, to say, “You know, you’re not a terrible father.”

Enzo slings one of his arms around Nicky and tells him, heedless of Nicky’s attempts to escape, “I am so excited to be your brother at last. Think of all the games I will take you to! Juventus season tickets are pretty affordable, you know.”

Joe catches his wink out of the corner of his eye and knows that this, too, is just a hint of normalcy for Nicky, that these people want nothing more than to have their brother back.

“I will be sad to see them leave, tomorrow,” Joe says as they go to bed that night, drawing his arms tighter around Nicky.

“I will not miss Enzo,” Nicky lies, nuzzling into Joe’s grip.

Joe laughs. “It pains me to say it, but I will especially miss Enzo.”

###  **during**

Stupidly, Booker is surprised that it hurts.

It’s a fucking car crash. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. There’s a long cut running across his arm from where it dragged against the broken glass of the window and it burns like a motherfucker. Sternly, he reminds himself that he has gotten shot and that a big fucking scratch on his bicep is not exactly the end of the world.

Apparently, two of his fingers are fractured and need to be splinted. Also fine.

He shifts groggily on his gurney in the back of the ambulance, dizzy. He’s drunk – verisimilitude is important in shit like this – and he’s hurting, and he can just make out Nile being carted into the ambulance alongside him.

The door slams shut behind her and the sirens go off.

Nile moans.

“Are you guys still sure about this?” Fiete asks. He’s standing awkwardly between the two gurneys. “We don’t have to—”

Booker looks over to Nile, waiting for her response.

“’m sure, stop asking,” Nile groans. “Just can’t move my head.”

“Fuck,” Booker says deliriously, trying to sit up.

“Stay down,” Fiete hisses, and presses a few buttons that set off a whole bunch of flashing lights and beeping sounds mimicking both of them flatlining at the same time. Booker knew this would happen; he paid for it to happen. And yet, it’s much too loud and disorienting.

When he’s parsed the sensory input enough to be able to follow what Fiete and Nile are saying, Nile is already sitting up, holding herself very stiffly.

“My arms fucking hurt,” she says.

“You have,” Fiete starts, and then stops. “Fuck, I don’t know it in English.” He looks over to Booker hopefully. “Schleudertrauma?”

Booker blinks a few times and then forces himself upright at the same time the ambulance careens around a corner. His stomach lurches with it. “Uh. Tumble trauma?” He translates badly, thinking of the settings on his washing machine. The settings on the washing machine in the apartment he’ll never see again.

Fiete shakes his head. “Whatever. Your head will hurt, and your neck and arms, for a while. Get yourself some painkillers.”

“Whiplash,” Nile surmises. “Fucking seriously?”

Booker groans. “Can you drive?”

“Don’t know.”

“You’re going to have to.”

She stares at him. “You gave me fucking whiplash, asshole, how am I supposed to drive?”

“I’m drunk, Nile,” he reminds her. “I can’t.”

“You had a few drinks, so what,” she hisses. “I literally can’t turn my head to the left.”

“You have side mirrors,” he says. “That’s better than driving drunk.”

“No it’s fucking not, people do it every day.” She winces as she tests the limits of her stiff neck. “Only some of them die.”

“Look, I’m not getting us in two accidents in one day,” he says, and it’s the end of the discussion, at least in part because they need to hurry it the fuck up, they still have a morgue to torch.

###  **before**

Nile’s mom would be so disappointed in her. She already is, truth be told, but she’d be even more disappointed if she could see Nile now, lying awake next to an older white man who keeps his wedding ring in plain sight on his night table.

When Nile joined the military, fresh out of high school, Rekia Boyd had just been shot in the middle of Douglas Park. Her mother’s words, which she’ll never forget, were, “They killed your dad and they’re gonna kill you, too.”

At the time, Nile had had some fancy ideas about changing the system from within, about making the world a better place by being compassionate.

Things haven’t really worked out that way.

She had thought she’d have to be excellent, to shine from the moment she started in order to make a difference and not end up one more black body sacrificed to the United States of America.

She had been right.

She’s good at what she does – very good, too good, has a reputation for bringing targets in live and not asking what happens to them next – which is why she’s here, passed from recruiter to recruiter, from secret project to secret project. At twenty-six, she’s been in the field for almost eight years, and it’s starting to make her sick to her stomach.

It’s new, that they’re asking this of her, that they’re taking her out of the war zone and having her go after someone who isn’t a public target of the US government.

Nile’s always wanted to see Europe.

She imagined going on guided tours and staring at artworks and buildings older than the entire USA in awe.

Instead, so far, she’s seen a hotel room, a seedy bar, and Sébastien’s apartment.

She wonders if that was what finally did it.

She’s been doubting, for a while, if she’s really on the right path. Nile’s always been disciplined - got her through school with good grades, even when she struggled. Kept her room tidy. Kept her mind tidy. The military made sense, for who she was. At eighteen, she had believed in the great American promise - a melting pot for everyone, all men being created equal, you could get anywhere if you worked hard enough and if you didn’t, you only had yourself to blame. Her mom was living proof. At eighteen, she had known her only chance at higher education was the military.

At twenty-three, she’d started to put words to the doubts that intruded on the tidy corners of her mind.

At twenty-three, she’d lost a whole night of sleep, scrolling through her Instagram feed, after George Zimmerman got acquitted.

In the morning, Dizzy had asked if she would be fit for duty.

It was the same question Nile had asked her, when she’d started off as Lance Corporal and found out her subordinate was eating a million times better than her because she got halal MREs.

That was the first time Nile felt ashamed of what she chose to do with her life.

They talked about it, sometimes, late at night. Her and Dizzy.

“I thought,” Dizzy had said, “I could be good, here. Make a difference. Bring in some kindness, some understanding.”

Nile had agreed, and neither of them had had to tell the other that that had been a lie. Not because they couldn’t be kind - a lie because they could be kind every day, to everyone, and the American military machine would continue to cost lives no matter how kind they were.

Those nights had gotten Nile through a year or two more, through missions that got harder and more inscrutable, through targets she wasn’t actually sure ought to have been targeted, through - worst of all - publicity photos for recruitment ads.

“They like us together,” Dizzy had surmised over a thermos filled with cocoa and a few stealthy shots of raki. “PC poster girls to show off.”

“Ask not what you can do for your country,” Nile had answered, a little buzzed and a lot angry, “ask what the fuck you’re doing for your country.”

Shortly after, she’d been recruited out of her job into black ops.

Dizzy would be fucking pissed at her, too.

It’s not fair that some mediocre white guy who used to help traffic drugs all around the Mediterranean is the one she lets get away. Sadiq, the last guy she brought in, allegedly had ties to ISIS. He also had two daughters, one of whom was younger than Nile was when she lost her dad. They’ll never even know what happened to him, and Nile will never know if she did the right thing, tailing him for two weeks and then taking him out with a sedative and delivering his unconscious body to the military. Maybe he did have ties to ISIS. Maybe he was going to drive a truck into the middle of a crowd in the name of his God. Maybe he had no idea his cousin was in over his head in extremism and got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one told Nile, and Nile didn’t ask.

No one has really asked Nile much of anything, since Dizzy. No one but Sébastien, who is definitely a criminal and probably an asshole. He had unmoored her, asking over and over what she wanted, if she was sure, and finally why she hadn’t just done her job already.

She hadn’t had any more answers for him than she’d had for herself, other than that she didn’t know what to do anymore.

Finally, after long enough sitting side-by-side in his living room that Sébastien’s bare chest had been covered in goosebumps, he’d asked, “Well, what do we do now?”

She hadn’t had any answers for that either, so they had just gone to bed.

He’d said, as he was falling asleep (too quickly, too trusting for a man who knew as well as she did she might still shoot him), “Things will be clearer in the morning, chérie.”

Nile’s mom used to say the same thing, only she’d called Nile “honey”.

Nile hasn’t talked to her mom in six months.

Her throat constricts with the knowledge that she might not talk to her mom for much, much longer than that if she continues on the path her own indecision set her on last night. She wonders if that would make her mom proud, to know it’s taken Nile a few years, but she gets it now, gets why it was such a blow that Nile chose the career she did.

The doorbell rings in the next room over.

Nile shuts her eyes on instinct, pretending to be asleep. Her eyes are unpleasantly gritty. She only managed to doze for an hour or two.

Sébastien groans as he wakes up to the sound of the buzzer.

He stumbles out of the bedroom to open the door.

Nile rolls onto her back and studies her surroundings. The room is bare of any personality, plain wooden furnishings, definitely IKEA-bought, definitely in a style Nile thinks of as old-fashioned. She wonders if Sébastien has been waiting for this. It certainly seemed like it, last night.

With a start, she realizes that he could be telling whoever’s at the door the full extent of who she is, could be getting a ride out of here, she’s kept no tabs on him, God, how did she get so bad at her job? She’s sliding off the bed and onto her feet before she’s thought about it for more than a moment, but logic sets in a moment later. If he hasn’t told whoever’s at the door yet, her running in like the soldier she is will give away the game.

She calls for him instead, aiming for airy and seductive, sticking to the paper-thin alibi that they just had a random one-night-stand last night (his lips had been dry and chapped, under hers, but he'd given way softly when she pressed into him harder, and she can still feel the roughness of his stubble against her neck, and it’s not that she didn’t _want_ to fuck him, it’s that it all got too tangled up in her head).

He ambles back into the room shortly after, clad in sweatpants and an unbuttoned shirt.

Nile licks her lips.

“Who was that?” She asks.

“My neighbour,” Sébastien says. “I’m supposed to feed his cat for a few days.”

She hadn’t really thought about what his life was like. She assumed he’d be doing shady deals in back alleys, shooting up in someone’s basement. Her only real experience with hard drugs is the time she watched _Requiem for a Dream_ on Jay's laptop, and she’d gotten so nauseous just watching she’d had to hide her face in Dizzy’s shoulder for the final third of the movie. She had never considered he would do something as mundane as helping out a neighbour.

“If you’re going to kidnap me to some super secret military base today, I’d like to let them know,” he adds. “Wouldn’t want Aramis to starve.”

“I’m not going to kidnap you,” Nile snaps, which is how she finds out she’s not.

They stare at each other for a moment.

“Coffee?” Sébastien asks.

Sitting across from each other on the squeaky bar stools in his kitchen (also IKEA), Nile sips her coffee. “So,” she says. “Why exactly am I supposed to take you in, anyway?”

He grimaces. “I wish you wouldn’t say that,” he frowns.

“Say what?”

“ _Take me in_ ,” he repeats with a sneer. “That’s a euphemism for some sort of state-sanctioned assassination if I’ve ever heard one.”

“Paranoid,” Nile snorts.

“Oh?” he asks, eyebrow raised. “What would happen to me, if you did whatever you were supposed to?”

“I don’t know,” Nile says. “That’s why I don’t want to do it.”

He doesn’t ask her anything, doesn’t even really change his expression, but she still feels like she has to explain.

“I’ve been doing this a few years, now,” she says. “But they never tell me what happens, afterwards. And, well…”

“Hm?” He asks, pouring more coffee into his cup. Not a morning person.

Nile sighs. “The pictures I saw of you were at least a decade old. The intel says you’re a junkie drugrunner who trafficked heroin towards the Balkans by the kilo.”

The corner of Sébastien’s lip twitches up.

“I feel like I’m missing some pieces,” Nile says. She stares down at her coffee. It’s black, and disgusting, and Sébastien doesn’t have any milk. “It’s not the first time I’ve felt like this.” She thinks, again, of Sadiq’s daughters. She’d tried to go back, to see how they were doing, if they needed anything. They wouldn’t open the door.

If she were at home, in Chicago, and the police knocked on the door, she probably wouldn’t open up either.

“You are missing some pieces,” Sébastien says easily. “Like the fact that, as far as the French government is concerned, I died ten years ago.”

She blinks.

“Well, that’s obviously bullshit.”

“Yeah,” he says, draining his cup. “But if only the Americans know it is, and they take me in without telling the French, that’s a diplomatic incident right there.”

Nile scours her brain, trying to remember what the file had to say about why, exactly, a marine recruited to black ops was taking this guy in, and not someone European. There had been nothing. There had been an Interpol report on why he was wanted, but that had been as old as the photos.

“Now, you want to know why your government wants me,” he begins, setting his cup on top of a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. “Come upstairs. I’ll show you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's after section is kind of a little addendum I had to write because as some of you know, chrysalis was largely inspired by me psyching myself up to propose. Then I did and wow it's a lot more stressful than I made it sound. (He said yes). (I made ravioli, not gnocchi).
> 
> This chapter's before section was one of the more difficult things I've ever written. As a disclaimer, I'm white, and if the way I've handled these themes was in any way disrespectful or wrong, please let me know.
> 
> Food notes: Germans very frequently make raclette for the holidays. If you've been to Switzerland, you've maybe seen real raclette, which is where they hold a whole block of cheese under an oven and then scrape off the melted top. A home-use raclette set is a different story, it's a little mini oven you set on the table and then you put your cheese and whatever else in a pan and let it melt. Germans will put anything in raclette. Anything.


	4. tea

###  **after**

“It’s nice to have the house to ourselves again,” Joe says, stretching. His henley rides up a little and Nicky can see the trail of hair leading towards his belly button. “But I will miss them.”

“Maybe we can go see them again in the summer,” Nicky suggests absently. “Anyway, we’ve got your family coming up.”

Joe groans, tilting his head back against the sofa cushions. “How could I forget?” He asks the ceiling balefully. “Ten days of sightseeing with my siblings. Yay.”

“It will be fun,” Nicky says. “I miss London.”

“Fun,” Joe says. “Sure. That’s one word for it.”

Maryam is relentlessly organized about her downtime, and she’s booked them a ten-day holiday over Joe’s Easter break. There’s an itinerary on Google Docs, and it’s already alarmingly full. Joe, who sometimes counts the days between school holidays, likes to spend his time off sleeping in and lazing around on the couch, rubbing Aramis’ belly and reading novels.

Nicky sits down next to Joe. “I’m sure it will be fine,” he says. “Anyway, Ibrahim never got to visit you in London, he wants to make up for lost time.”

“That’s true,” Joe agrees, and Nicky knows he’s thinking that he’ll have to pull himself together for Ibrahim’s sake, because his divorce is still too fresh for Joe to spend their whole sibling holiday complaining. Personally, Nicky’s thankful he’s even invited.

Sighing, Joe curls towards Nicky. “What would I do without you?” He asks.

It’s a highly rhetorical question he asks about twelve times a week, so Nicky feels safe responding with a kiss. Left to his own devices, Joe will expound for far too long that he would be utterly lost without Nicky’s presence, his cooking, his shoulders, his dick and so on. As flattering as that is, right now, Nicky would rather kiss. 

“Mm,” Joe hums in surprise, pressed back against the couch cushions. “Oh,” he gasps when they pull apart. “What brought this on?”

“I thought you wanted to make a baby?” Nicky asks innocently. 

Joe punches him in the shoulder. “You are very lucky I love you so much. That joke alone would be grounds for divorce.”

“I am _very_ lucky,” Nicky agrees, and goes back to kissing Joe. If they do have children, they’re eventually going to have to stop fucking on the sofa. What a shame. 

“Nicky,” Joe says, wrenching his mouth away. “Nicky, can we...get some supplies?”

Nicky smiles. They haven’t had anal in a few weeks - too much prep, too much mess, especially with house guests around. With a full vacation day still ahead of them and then the weekend after, now seems like a very good time.

“You want to get cleaned up, love?” He asks.

Joe nods, but there’s a red flush on his cheekbones Nicky’s a little suspicious of.

“What else do you want?” Nicky asks.

“Could we use the pink vibrator?” Joe asks, almost shy. 

Nicky swallows heavily. “Sure,” he says. “You get in the shower. I’ll get everything set up.”

He lays out a towel on their bed while Joe is in the shower. The sofa is firmer, easier for leverage, but if they use the vibrator - well, Joe sometimes has trouble moving, after. The ensuite bathroom is easier to stumble into and out of for clean-up.

Nicky strips off and rummages in the drawers of his bedside table for the lube and the toys, and then lays down to wait for Joe.

He’s not long - Nicky remembers, when they had just started, that he would take up to twenty minutes in the bathroom, cleaning up. These days, five will do it, and then he has a damp, naked husband clambering over him to settle his knees on either side of Nicky’s hips and kiss him stupid.

They kiss for a while, but they both know where this is going, and when Nicky’s comfortably half-hard, he asks Joe, “How do you want it?”

“I thought you could lick me open, first,” Joe says, and Nicky shudders pleasantly. “And then open me up some more on the plug.”

“I like this plan. What’s next?”

“I ride you till you come and then you blow my mind.”

Nicky’s hips squirm up against Joe’s instinctually.

They had figured out early on that Joe goes pretty useless after orgasm. He’ll power through it, for Nicky, but he goes instantly soft and cuddly once he’s come. It’s better if they take care of Nicky first, for something like this. 

A little later, they had figured out that while Joe isn’t particularly into being rimmed - he can take it or leave it - having Joe sit on his face makes Nicky ridiculously, outrageously hard.

Joe knee-walks up the bed until he’s settled on Nicky’s face, and Nicky groans into his skin.

He loves this. Loves the smell of Joe, the claustrophobia of Joe’s thighs either side of his head, blocking out everything but the blood rushing in his ears, keeping it dark and warm. He wraps a loose fist around his cock, just to feel it throb while he licks messily at Joe’s ass, burying his nose against Joe’s taint. He knows he’s making noise, knows he’s groaning into the folds of Joe’s skin, but who could blame him?

He runs his hands up Joe’s thighs, enjoys the scrape of his palms against the crisp curls of hair there. Joe grinds his ass down on Nicky’s face.

Nicky’s cock drips a thick glob of precome onto his lower belly. 

Joe must feel him tense and relax with it, because he dismounts shortly after, breathless and grinning. “Have fun?” He asks.

Nicky groans.

Joe leans down gracefully and licks the evidence of Nicky’s enjoyment off his stomach. “Mm.”

Blindly, Nicky grabs for the lube and the plug.

At some point, Joe had gotten too sensitive for fingering. Nicky can’t even quite remember it - it was after Hamburg, but before the wedding. Maybe it’s because Nicky bites his nails and the skin around them, leaving the tips of his fingers just a little too rough, but it had fully destroyed Joe’s enjoyment of sex several times in a row and left him with an unpleasant burning sensation. There had a been a few times after that when Joe opened himself up in the shower, which had left Nicky feeling irritated and inadequate. Finally, they’d reached the compromise of Nicky opening Joe up slowly on a flared plug.

Nicky still hopes someday he can go back to opening Joe up on his fingers, but for now, watching Joe’s expression as Nicky slowly, slowly sinks the plug into him, eyes widening as the flared part stretches him, is more than enough.

Far too soon, when Nicky’s barely started pressing the plug in and out, Joe gasps, “Enough, enough, c’mon, it’s your turn.”

He pulls the plug out himself, throwing it to the side of the bed, and straddles Nicky again.

It never quite gets easier to start penetration in this position, when neither of them can see. Nicky holds his cock steady so Joe can sink down on it just right. When this is the main event, they like to start missionary, so Nicky can slide in and help Joe get used to it.

Tonight, this isn’t the main event, at least not for Joe, so they make do. There are a few false starts, and then Joe slides down slowly on Nicky’s cock, breathing in and out steadily. He’s not entirely hard anymore, so Nicky snakes a hand down to help him.

“No,” Joe shakes his head. “I don’t want to get carried away, this part is for you.”

He lifts himself up slowly and slams down again so hard the bed creaks and Nicky gasps, the breath punched out of him.

Joe’s learned a lot of tricks in their time together, though, and fairly quickly, he stops moving simply up and down and starts grinding his hips in jerky little circles. It makes Nicky’s cock slip out once or twice, but it also rubs his foreskin back and forth just right, and in no time at all, he’s sobbing under Joe’s expert hands.

“You like that?” Joe asks, voice smug and gravelly.

“Fuck, you know I do,” Nicky groans, grabbing for Joe’s hips. “Gonna make me fill you up.”

Joe groans, falling forwards further, until they’re sharing the same air and Nicky is thrusting up, up, up gracelessly, fucking himself as deep as he can get and coming hot and wet into Joe, letting himself slip right over the precipice as soon as he can.

“ _Joe_ ,” he mumbles, heart racing as Joe grinds against him for long enough that the last of his orgasm spasms through him almost painfully.

Joe’s fully hard for him by now. He sits up, still on Nicky’s cock, and stares down at him, dark eyes glittering. “That looked good,” he says.

“Felt good,” Nicky says, still catching his breath.

Joe grins and dismounts, slowly, carefully, and lays down beside Nicky.

“Give me a second,” Nicky says.

“Take your time,” Joe smiles, pressing a kiss to his cheek. 

If Nicky takes his time, he’ll get a little too sleepy for the rest of the plan and they both know it, so he only gives himself a moment more to enjoy Joe’s warmth and face and everything before he rolls up to sit on his knees and grab the vibrator. 

By himself, Joe can make himself come with the damn thing in ten minutes.

Nicky’s watched.

When Nicky does it, it takes a little longer, because he’s not in Joe’s body and can’t feel exactly which angle to press it in. Either way, though, the stimulation makes tears gather in Joe’s eyes. Either way, he makes the most beautiful noises.

When Nicky’s got it settled in Joe, he turns on the lowest setting.

Joe moans. “Tease,” he says.

Joe would turn it up to the highest consistent vibration and just press it in at the right angle.

Nicky plays with him, turns on one of the settings with intermittent buzzing, pulls it out and presses it back in.

Joe’s gone from hard to leaking, turning his head back and forth on the pillows. “Fuck,” he gasps out. “Fuck, Nicky, come on, please.”

Relenting, Nicky presses the vibrator deep and angled up.

Joe sobs, writhing on the sheets.

“Why’d you want this tonight?” Nicky asks, idle curiosity and also a bit of a tease.

“Wanted to feel out of control,” Joe says between heavy breaths. “Wanted to…”

“Wanted to come so hard you cry,” Nicky surmises, and ducks down to take Joe’s cock in his mouth.

Joe comes so hard he cries, spurting hotly onto Nicky’s tongue. Nicky can feel the steady vibrations on his tongue, can feel Joe’s entire body shaking like a leaf.

When it’s over, when Nicky’s taken the vibrator out and rinsed it and the plug and himself off in the bathroom, Joe still hasn’t moved. Nicky slides into bed and pulls Joe into his arms.

“That was amazing,” Joe mumbles into his skin. “My thighs are going to kill me tomorrow.”

“Old man,” Nicky teases.

Joe pokes him in the bellybutton, which he knows Nicky hates.

“If we have kids, it will be hard to do stuff like that,” Joe points out.

“For a few years, maybe,” Nicky says. “But we have our whole lives.”

Joe hides his smile against Nicky’s shoulder, but they both know it’s there.

Nicky’s just about to doze off in this unusual position, Joe curled towards him instead of behind him, when the doorbell rings.

Joe’s out cold already, so Nicky rolls out of bed, pulls on his sweatpants and stumbles downstairs to the door, prepared to be very impolite to whoever it is.

He wrenches open the door to find a dead man.

“Hi, Nicky,” Booker says sheepishly, waving at him like an idiot.

When Nicky was eight, the only item on his Christmas wishlist was _world peace_. He remembers, unfortunately, because Elena showed Joe a picture of it over New Year’s and Joe politely said he must have been a hilarious child. Later, in bed, he had crowed that Nicky must have been _such a little nerd_.

This doesn’t stop Nicky from punching Booker squarely in the jaw.  
  


###  **during**

There’s a police officer at the door. She introduced herself, but Joe forgot her name instantly, all he can think to identify her by is the curly hair springing out of its ponytail at the base of her uniform cap. She’s invited herself into their home, is standing in their living room with a notepad, asking a series of invasive questions.

When did they last see Herr le Livre? Two days ago, for pizza, which they ate standing in the kitchen, laughing and drinking wine while Quynh and Andy fought and reconciled in the living room.

Did he seem different than usual? Yes, he was happy.

Was it usual for Herr le Livre to drink? Yes, it was.

Would Joe call his drinking normal or excessive? Joe would call it excessive if he were talking to Booker, but talking to a police officer who can’t quite keep the tiredness and strain of the night shift out of her tone, who appears to be looking to end this conversation as soon as possible, Joe refuses to call it that.

Does Joe know who the other person in the car might have been? Joe remembers Nile, sweet, young Nile, and feels sick.

Herr le Livre and his companion were taken to the hospital in critical condition, she tells him when she’s done asking questions. Joe and Nicky are not family members, but since Herr le Livre does not seem to have any family, they will be informed when there is news. Perhaps they can see if there is any information on Herr le Livre’s family in his apartment in the meantime.

When the officer leaves, Joe sinks onto the couch, staring blindly into nothing.

“I’ll go check out his apartment,” Andy says, and there’s a door slamming as she leaves. She’s never been good at waiting.

“I’ll make you some tea,” Quynh says. She’s never been good at emotional vulnerability.

This leaves Joe and Nicky alone, to stare silently at each other.

“They’ll be alright,” Joe says. “Right?”

Nicky doesn’t answer.  
  
  
  


###  **before**

Booker has lived in Hamburg for nearly six years now.

Nile is the first person to see the upstairs of his apartment.

He’s a little proud, actually, almost misty-eyed, hunched over under the slanted roof and turning on the lights so she can see -- all of it.

There’s the desk under the window, with the magnifying glass, the stacks of papers on the surface. He’s not a neat person, never has been, but he’s good at his craft. Then there’s the shelf, which is his second reason for not just burning this house down. It took him years to amass this amount of historical and current documentation, and that he keeps organized in binders and photo albums.

There’s the lamps, and, well, the lighting is a little harsh, but he needs to see what he’s doing.

“Feel free to look around,” he says. If he’s already been caught, he might as well show off a little. Ten years is a long time to repent, and a long time to work as hard as he does with no validation.

It takes her a few minutes sifting through his desk to ask, “Why all the death certificates?”

Booker leans against the wall. “Germans are pretty specific about who they let in,” he says. “Unaccompanied minors are top of the list, so it pays off to have documentation that you’re an orphan.”

“Even if you’re not,” Nile guesses. Correctly.

Booker shrugs. “It works. Better to lie to the government here than drown in the Mediterranean or get stuck in some unlivable refugee camp with no hope of getting into mainland Europe.”

“What gives you the right to decide that?”

“What gives you the right to decide who you hand off to your government?” Booker asks sharply, and she winces. “You know how they decide who gets asylum?”

Nile shakes her head. 

“They do a series of interviews with an asylum judge. And that one single person then gets to decide how authentic someone else’s trauma is and whether or not they should be granted asylum or shunted off back to some endless mess of German paperwork they have no hope of understanding, or, worse yet, back to whatever they’re running from.”

Nile doesn’t say anything, but she turns back to the documents. After a while of sifting through it all, she holds up a stack of passports and visas. “This is why the States want you?” 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Booker says. “I think so. It’s certainly the most lucrative thing I do.”

“So,” Nile says. “You charge money to save people’s lives.”

Booker snorts. “No,” he says. “I charge money to help petty criminals escape from your horrendous system of mass incarceration on faked visas. That allows me to help people who actually need it for free.” He rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I also do a little art restoration, which is actually a legal enterprise.”

“You’re trying to convince me that breaking the laws of several different countries and aiding and abetting illegal emigration of criminals from the States is a good thing?”

Booker sighs. “The reason they’re probably on to me is that I keep tabs on everyone I sell forged papers to. I call in anonymous tip-offs if they fall back into old ways. A lot of criminals looking to run away are looking to start over, though, you know.”

“Like you did,” Nile says absently, tracing a finger over the thick paper of a fake death certificate.

Abruptly, Booker can’t say anything at all anymore.

He is proud of this, he does think he started over and he’s doing better, but to hear it be said --

He learned to fake death certificates on a whim. He had been high as shit, and his best friend slash dealer slash boss had asked him how he would move seventy kilos of heroin through the entirety of the Balkans at once without everyone involved getting arrested immediately. 

Euphoric, calm, and for the first time since Adele's brother’s funeral, not filled with anguish, Booker had snickered, “Put it in a coffin.”

He doubts he’ll ever make up for the worst he’s done in his life, but he is trying, goddamn it.

Nile’s eyes are intense when they turn on him. “You are doing good,” she says, like it’s a fact and not everything he’s been dying to hear for most of his life. “I never thought too much about how to do that, outside of what’s legal.”

“I’m trying,” he says, hoarse for some reason.

She steps closer to him. She smells a little like the smoke from the bar last night, a little like whatever skin product she uses. Last night, she had been on top of him and telling him what to do. Last night, his body had woken up again and remembered what it was like to want.

Her hand is warm on his cheek. 

Words spill from his lips, because he’s been waiting so long for this moment, to explain himself, even if it is to someone who’s chasing him for it. “I know I can’t erase what I did before,” he says. “I know I should have gone to jail. By the time I was sober enough to understand, I just...I’m a coward, Nile. This is all I have to offer.”

She leans her forehead against his. “You’ve done more good in the last ten years than I have,” she says.

He’s not sure if he’s laughing or sobbing.

“Sébastien,” she says, voice pitched low.

At some point, he’d closed his eyes, but they blink open to find hers.

Why this woman should be the person to make him feel like he’s broken open all the scabbed-over parts of himself for the first time in years is beyond him, but here he is, leaning towards her, wondering if maybe, now, with things clearer between them, he can lean closer, kiss her again, pick up where they left off.

(He knows why it’s her, really.)

(He can read it in the tense way she holds her jaw, in the way she speaks about herself, that she is crossing a bridge he crossed a decade ago into the pain and regret of understanding your own mistakes.)

(He admires her for it, because where he was dragged, kicking and screaming, into sobriety and self-loathing, she is choosing this herself.)

Their lips are only a hair’s breadth apart.

From downstairs, there is a loud clatter.

Someone yells, “Booker!”

He pulls away sharply, fumbling for the keys to this room that no one but Nile should ever see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp finally starting to use all those explicit tags
> 
> This chapter is part of my ongoing project to characterize Booker as really, really not liking the USA very much, which I think would be apt for a Frenchman who was expecting American aid circa 1794 and got "ehhhh we did that thing in Haiti, that's enough" as an answer. But I digress.


	5. quiche

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: mention of hard drugs, addiction, related violence, negotiating a threesome on slightly false premises

###  **after**

  


The last time Joe was in the kitchen with this group of people, it was a very different night. He was kind of drunk for the first time in years, he was full from eating Nicky’s delicious pizza, and he was happy.

He wraps the ice pack from the top freezer drawer in a kitchen towel and places it gently on Nicky’s bruised knuckles. 

“Let me do that?” He asks, pulling the cutting board and the knife away from Nicky. 

“Small cubes,” Nicky reminds him.

“Are you not gonna give Sébastien an ice pack?” Nile asks, leaning against the fridge. She looks cool as a cucumber, utterly ignorant of the tension in Nicky’s grip on the counter, where his knuckles are resting under the ice pack.

Joe turns on his heel again, not letting go of the knife, and digs in the freezer. They only have the one ice pack - the others must still be in the guest room from when Elena pulled her ankle a bit taking the stairs up from the subway stop - so he digs out a bag of frozen peas and throws them down on the table in front of Booker.

Booker flinches.

As he should.

Joe was seriously considering throwing them at his face.

The only thing stopping him is that he does actually feel kind of bad about the bruise blossoming red on Booker’s cheek. It’s really not like Nicky.

What is like Nicky is that he has decided now, eleven forty-five PM, is the time to make quiche, because there are guests in the house and they need feeding and there was an extra roll of puff pastry in the freezer. 

“So?” Nicky prompts, watching Joe chop the feta and the sun-dried tomatoes like a hawk.

“So what?” Booker asks, muffled through the bag of peas he’s pressing to his face.

Nicky swears in Italian - honestly, calling Booker a cock is an insult to cocks everywhere - and slams his hand down on the counter much too hard. Joe just barely catches his wince at the pain. Bruised knuckles are no joke.

“You know what,” Nicky grits out. “We had a funeral for you, you asshole.”

Booker swallows, looking away. “Forgive me,” he says caustically. “I thought you might be happy to know I’m not--”

The knife scrapes along the glass cutting board. It’s Joe’s least favorite cutting board, which is perversely why Nicky always uses it, and now Joe is stuck with it because Nicky needs to not use his hand right now.

“Will we be happy you’re not dead when you fucking explain yourself?” Joe asks rhetorically. “Sure. Are we pissed off beyond measure and reason that we’ve spent the last two months mourning your death and you were just off on holiday? What the fuck, Booker? You think you can just waltz back in here after doing that to us, you--”

“Joe,” Nicky says, laying his uninjured hand on Joe’s chest to stop Joe from advancing closer towards Booker with the knife still in his hand. “Not now.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Joe mutters, eyebrows raised at Nicky’s injured hand.

Nicky just stares back at him, green-grey eyes daring him to comment again.

Joe turns back to the cutting board. Nicky’s probably right and he’ll regret yelling at Booker as soon as he does it.

He still really wants to do it.

“Are you going to explain yourself?” Nicky asks, shaking the pan so the roasting pine-nuts move around a little and get evenly toasted. 

Booker sighs heavily, but doesn’t speak.

Nile is the one who pushes herself off from her position, leaning against the fridge, and sits down on a chair next to Booker. “It’s my fault,” she says.

“It’s not,” Booker leaps in immediately. “If it hadn’t been you--”

“If it hadn’t been me, chances are you’d be actually dead. Or worse.” Nile winces as she says it, like it’s something she doesn’t want to think about it.

Guiltily, Joe thinks back two months, when Nile had been sitting just there, legs crossed, sipping her wine. She’d been nice. Funny, willing to take the strange situation of being exiled into the kitchen for Quynh and Andy’s overdue reunion at face value, totally open to coming to dinner at Booker’s neighbor’s just after one of them had lost a parent. It should have struck him as odd, at the time. He certainly wouldn’t have, if someone he’d just met had asked him. 

(That’s not quite true. If Nicky had asked him for something that strange, just after they’d met, he’d have said yes. He’d hoped, that night, that maybe Booker had found something like what he and Nicky had. The next two months, he’d drowned in regret that he had had such disregard for a young woman’s life and happiness that he’d hoped she could  _ fix  _ his troubled friend instead of warning her in time about Booker’s problems.)

“I’m a marine,” Nile says, which proves that Joe had read every nuance of their situation wrong in October. “Or I was, I guess. Sébastien was wanted for--well, they didn’t actually tell me what for. I was supposed to go undercover, kidnap him and deliver him the U.S. military.”

The microwave beeps.

Nicky reaches for it, but Joe stops him, pressing the ice pack he’s left on the counter into his hands again. Nicky rolls his eyes, but lets Joe take the defrosted spinach out of the microwave. 

“You have to drain it,” Nicky says, making an aborted move to go to the sink.

“I have watched you make quiche at least seven different times, amore,” Joe grits out. “If only you get the pleasure of punching Booker, at least trust me not to fuck up your recipe.”

Booker snorts, and they both turn to him at once, daring him wordlessly to say it.

He doesn’t.

Yet.

“Anyhow,” Nile says, clearing her throat. “I kinda had a crisis of...faith, or confidence, or something, and decided to not do my job anymore. I realized that even if I went back empty-handed, I wouldn’t get out that easy, and I’d spend the rest of my life muzzled by the military. Also, someone else would have come after him. So we, uh…” she makes a gesture and trails off.

“So you faked your own deaths and left the country,” Joe says. “Excuse me if I fail to see how that is the logical course of events.”

“My job ended up getting a lot of people put into prisons the rest of the world has never heard of and getting tortured,” Nile says bluntly. “I also had a lot of contact to intelligence agents. You don’t just resign from that kind of career without signing a fuck-ton of NDAs, and I didn’t want -- I wanted a chance to make up for the things I’ve done. Sébastien offered me that.”

Joe pressed the roll of puff pastry into the glass dish. He takes out a fork and starts stabbing the bottom, just a little too viciously. “And what exactly did Sébastien do to get himself on the wanted list of the military?”

None of them talk for a while.

Joe takes the spinach when Nicky hands it to him, spreads it out onto the dough, and the sundried tomatoes and the feta and the pinenuts. Finally, he pours the egg-milk-salt-pepper-paprika mix over it all until the quiche is filled to the brim. It’s only when he’s put it in the oven that Booker finally talks.

“I was a heroin addict,” is what he says.

Joe sits down heavily across from him. 

Booker won’t meet his eye, tracing patterns on the kitchen table with his fingertip. 

Nicky comes to sit beside them, laying his own hand on the table in the immediate vicinity of Booker’s. “Sébastien,” he says.

“About seventeen years ago,” Booker says. “When I still lived in France. My wife’s brother got us some drugs for my stag night, before I married her. It was, uh, ecstasy, I think. I don’t really remember. I was just starting off, then - I was a lawyer, if you can believe that, and I hated it, but everyone said you only study art history if you want to be a waiter and I wanted to marry Adele and have a family, so I switched to law--anyway.”

He pauses again and Joe tries desperately to adjust his worldview. 

They’ve been worried about Booker’s drinking for a long time, almost since they’ve known him. Three beers - the big ones, the half-liter bottles - barely even affect him. Once a month or so, he has too much and gets maudlin, and that usually takes at least twice the amount in beer as well as at least four shots of hard liquor. 

Knowing, now, that he used to be an addict, makes Joe reevaluate. Booker’s drinking certainly isn’t healthy. It’s not life-threatening, though.

He gestures for Booker to continue. 

“Well. Unsurprisingly, ecstasy made me feel good. Adele’s brother was in pretty deep, we starting doing cocaine in restaurant bathrooms after work. And then somehow I was shooting up on my coffee break, and fucking up my job, and we were pregnant and I was an addict and no one could know. Everything just spiralled, and spiralled, and spiralled, and by the time I was thirty, I was using my half of an art history degree to forge documents for my dealer because I’d lost my job and my wife couldn’t find out.”

Booker takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“My brother-in-law OD’d and my wife figured everything out,” he says eventually. “I was high at the funeral. I’d faked enough documents for enough other criminals that the police knew there must be a forger involved. It all started falling apart, and I couldn’t see a way out.”

“What did you do, Booker?” Nicky asks. Joe is endlessly grateful for it. He could not ask as kindly.

He shrugs. “I set my boss’s meth lab on fire and faked my own death.”

“Fucking hell,” Joe says with little to no input from his brain. “And you’ve just been hiding here ever since?”

Booker laughs shakily. “No,” he says. “I spent about a year getting clean in a variety of awful dumps, and then I spent a few years in Croatia.”

“What was in Croatia?”

Booker swallows and doesn’t answer.

“Sébastien’s been trying to make up for past mistakes for years,” Nile says when the silence wears on for too long. “Faking documents for refugees. That kind of thing. My -- the US government noticed and sent me.”

“Right,” Joe says.

Quiche takes forty-five minutes to bake.

For at least thirty minutes, no one speaks.

“Right,” Joe says with forced cheer when the oven timer beeps. “Who’s ready for one AM quiche?”

Booker inhales deeply, but Nicky glares him into silence.

“I’ve never had quiche,” Nile says gamely.

“That’s not quiche," Booker bursts out as if he hasn't been dying to say it ever since Nicky pulled out the puff pastry.

Joe winces and gets busy taking out plates and silverware. Booker was doing so well, not saying it.

“My mistake,” Nicky says coldly. “I thought it was. But I also thought we were friends. Mistakes happen.”

“We  _ are  _ friends,” Booker argues heatedly. “As least, I hope we still are.”

“It’s a fucking quiche, Book,” Nicky tells him tightly.

“Quiche isn’t made of puff pastry.”

“I’m sorry.” Nicky’s teeth are clenched. Joe busies himself with cutting the quiche into slices and levering each slice onto a plate. “I didn’t happen to have to makings for the right fucking kind of pastry for your majesty, but  _ I _ thought you were  _ dead _ , so this has all been very impromptu.”

“I get it,” Booker groans. “You’re mad, and you’re right to be--”

“You don’t tell me what to feel,” Nicky says. “You shut the fuck up and you eat the quiche.”

“Okay, guys,” Nile says. “We get it, everyone has a lot of feelings about the quiche. But, uh, we kinda still need to talk about why we came back?”

Nicky gestures for her to continue.

“Someone’s tracking us,” Nile says, and starts eating.

  
  


###  **during**

  


The getaway car is a manual.

Fucking Germany, Nile thinks. Fucking Germany and their fucking manual transmissions and their fucking underground morgues. 

It took a full hour to get into the morgue, get out of the bodybags, put in the decoys and set the place on fire. 

“I really hope you tipped that paramedic,” Nile grits out as she fumbles the clutch. Again.

Sébastien laughs hoarsely in the passenger seat. He’s probably right, he shouldn’t be driving, he looks like absolute shit - pale and shaking with bags under his eyes. On the other hand, Nile’s eyes are glued to the rearview mirror half the time, because she can’t fucking turn her head around.

What a shit day.

“Fiete’s not gonna talk,” Sébastien groans. “I helped his girlfriend and her daughter get asylum.”

His voice is scratchy from exhaustion and smoke.

He sounds almost as good as he did when she was fucking him.

###  **before**

  


There’s a woman in Sébastien’s living room, sprawled out on the sofa (the sofa she pressed him into last night, the sofa they very nearly fucked on before he pulled the breaks, and it’s probably not a good thing that Nile’s kind of regretting that she didn’t at least find out if he was actually as pliant and sweet as he seemed).

She looks like a model.

Not a supermodel or anything, the kind of model who wears fancy hiking gear and poses dramatically on top of a mountain for Jack Wolfskin or something. 

She’s got her feet propped up on the coffee table, black sneakers still on. Her legs are encased in grey high-waist skinny jeans, and because the universe is unfair, her belly is so flat it’s not even doing the muffin-topping thing that Nile always gets after wearing pants like that for longer than an hour. Her T-shirt is plain black, loose enough to not cling but tight enough to show the curve of her breasts.

Nile’s still wearing her stupid cover’s glittery gold top, and she hates it with the familiar envy of seeing a beautiful woman make ordinary clothes look fantastic. 

“Andy,” Sébastien says, coming downstairs after having locked the door to his secret lair.

“Booker,” the woman who is presumably named Andy returns.

Nile blinks. “Booker?” She asks him.

He sighs. “My last name is le Livre.”

It’s not; they both know it’s not, but it was stupid enough of him to keep his former first name. Of course he has a cover. Even if it’s a really, really stupid cover. She thinks, for just a moment, how Jay had described the Air Force guy she was seeing to her and Dizzy -  _ “pure of heart, dumb of ass” _ \- and how they had all laughed about it for ages. Would Jay pull out that  _ Himbeaux  _ meme if Nile told her she was seeing a French guy?

Fuck, Nile’s not seeing a French guy. 

Nile’s  _ failing to do her job _ at capturing and imprisoning a French criminal.

“And who is this?” Andy asks, somehow intensifying her sprawl.

“This is Nile,” Sébastien says. “We met in St. Pauli last night.”

Andy’s eyebrows climb up. Good, let her draw her own conclusions. “Were you there for the game?” She asks, sounding skeptical. Nile’s not up to scratch on her European sports, but she knows when she’s being felt out and found lacking.

“Nah,” Nile says, giving Sébastien a very slow and thorough once-over. “The view.”

Andy cracks a smile and slides to her feet. She holds out her hand. “Nice to meet you,” she says. 

“Likewise,” Nile says, shaking the offered hand. “How did you say you got in?”

“Picked the lock,” Andy says easily. “Booker’s used to it. Where are Joe and Nicky?”

“Italy,” Sébastien says. “Family emergency.”

A frown line draws tight along Andy’s exquisite face. Nile wonders how old she is. She could be in her early thirties. She could also be Sébastien’s age, easy. God, Nile is so young.

“They never go to Italy,” Andy says, an odd note in her voice.

Sébastien shrugs.

“I’m sorry,” Nile says, with her most charming smile. “Who are Joe and Nicky?” She hopes Sébastien catches the not very subtle undertone that if these are all more criminals he called in to help him escape, she’s going to shoot him on the spot. In the knee, so he needs a couple years of rehab, minimum.

“My neighbors,” Sébastien says. “With the cat? Andy’s their friend. She just comes to bug me when she forgets to call ahead and no one’s home in their apartment.”

“You like when I bug you,” Andy says, grinning wolfishly.

Interestingly, Sébastien’s cheeks flush red.

In a move she practiced in the mirror for over an hour when she was fifteen, Nile crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

Andy’s expression can only be described as predatory.

“You seem adventurous,” she purrs. “I could show you.”

In the quiet of the room, Nile can hear Sébastien swallow. 

She takes a deep breath and tries to work through it all.

Andy has clearly slept with Sébastien before, and is offering to again, possibly with Nile’s involvement. She’s assuming that Nile and Sébastien have already had sex, which is what they want her to think. The question is what to do now. Nile could easily back out, say she’s not into women and just let this whole moment pass into awkwardness. On the other hand, she’s a little worried she won’t be able to keep up the pretense of being Sébastien’s one night stand if she says no. What reason would she have to stick around?

On the other, other hand, she almost kissed him again, less than ten minutes ago.

He had shown her who he really was, who he was trying to be, and she had thought, for the first time, that there might be some sort of future for her outside of the mess she’s gotten herself into.

And the way his eyes had just gone liquid, when she’d said he was doing good--

Nile is woman enough to admit she really wants to see where that would go.

She’s also, as it happens, really into women.

But it was Sébastien who pulled the breaks last night, and it was him who had a problem with fucking on false pretenses, so it should be him who makes this call.

“I’m always down to learn new things,” she says airily. “How do you feel about it, Seb?”

Judging by his expression, he feels very surprised by it.

“I,” he says, flushing even more. “Uh. You’d really--”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing her take you apart a little,” Nile says, congratulating herself on how smooth and confident it comes out. She’s not even lying; Andy’s hot, Sébastien’s hot, and it sounds like they’d be doing something Nile might have never done before, which is always exciting.

“I would like that,” he says.

Remembering that Andy is still there, Nile turns to her. She’s smiling at them, which is interesting, because it’s such a good look on her, and not at all one Nile had expected.

“Why don’t you go take a shower, then?” She suggests to Sébastien.

He heads to the bathroom with alacrity.

“So,” Andy says. “Nile.”

“Yeah,” Nile says.

“I like what you did there, checking in with him. That’s good, he needs that.”

Nile swallows, remembering last night, when she didn’t check in at all and they nearly blew past his comfort zone. “He gets himself hurt because he forgets to say stop,” she intuits.

“Exactly,” Andy nods. “You get it, that’s good.”

Something about the way she talks makes Nile pleased to have met her expectations. There’s something familiar to it, something that reminds Nile of how she wanted to be as a Lance Corporal: someone whose approval meant something.

“Do you have any experience with this kind of thing?” Andy asks.

“Threesomes?” Nile asks back. “Nah.”

Andy laughs. “That’s okay. You’re not gonna get jealous, are you?”

That’s actually probably a good question. Will she get jealous? She tries to picture it - Andy’s hands on Sébastien’s body, that firm chest she felt yesterday, stroking up and down, him under her, arching up into it.

Nope. 

That feeling in the pit of her stomach, that’s not jealousy, that’s arousal.

She imagines them kissing, holding hands, and okay, that’s a little worse.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “Unless you’re gonna start leaving me out.”

Andy snorts. “Unlikely,” she says. “My arrangement with Booker is pretty clear.”

“What else should I know?” Nile asks.

“Did you talk about safewords yet?” Andy asks.

That’s the kind of thing Nile’s heard of but never actually had any cause to use. Something of that may read on her face, because Andy waves the thought away. 

“Never mind,” she says. “That’s a conversation for the two of you to have some other time. We’ll keep it all vanilla today.”

Nile laughs shakily. This doesn’t seem vanilla to her.

Andy’s smile softens again. Nile gets the sense this woman is all sharp edges wrapped protectively around a sensitive core. “Don’t worry,” she says. “This will be fun. Test run?”

She’s slid closer, Nile realizes. Right into Nile’s personal space.

“Yeah, alright,” Nile breathes. It’s been a rough day; a kiss from a beautiful woman can only make it improve at this point. Besides, she’d rather not back out now and have to explain why exactly she’s really here. It’d be a shame to shoot Andy.

Andy’s still smiling when their lips meet, and it makes Nile smile, too. It’s a firm kiss, a peck, and Nile’s done more than this, had more than this, with Dizzy, sometimes, when they’d had enough raki to take a little risk in the dark.

She’s never kissed a woman in the full light of day, though, never kissed a woman knowing with certainty there was more to come, and she’s kind of glad it’s a stranger, that there’s none of the baggage there was with Dizzy. This, she can handle.

Andy pulls away, lips closed, still smiling, and Nile pulls her back in. Andy’s taller, but Nile’s still wearing last night’s heels and she has the advantage, sliding her head to the side to kiss Andy properly.

With their mouths opened, Nile can tell that Andy tastes like tic-tacs, like she popped a few before coming over, probably straight from the airport or train station or wherever she came from to visit her friends. Andy’s hands are at Nile’s waist, grounding her as they deepen the kiss.

It takes Nile a moment to remember she can move, and when she draws her hands down the smooth lines of Andy’s back, Andy makes an appreciative noise into her lips. One of the hands at Nile’s waist worms its way under her flimsy top, until there’s warm skin brushing skin.

Nile shivers.

By the time Sébastien gets out of the shower, they’re sitting on the couch, making out, legs tangled together, and Nile’s got a solid grip at the base of Andy’s short hair. 

He clears his throat, loudly, and Nile would pull back, but Andy keeps them tight together with her hand at the small of Nile’s back. She just turns her head towards Sébastien, ending their kiss but leaving their bodies pressed together.

“See something you like, Book?” She asks.

Sébastien’s wearing nothing but a towel that might be full-size on a smaller man. 

He’s not smaller, though.

Somewhere between straddling him on the couch and holding his heart in her hands less than an hour ago, Nile has forgotten that he’s huge, because he holds himself small. Like this, though, droplets speckled in his chest hair, the firmness of his body on display, it’s impossible to forget. He’s not ripped or anything, but he’s strong, and beautiful with it.

“You know I do,” he says, and goddamn, on anyone else, that line would be sleazy as hell, but he pairs it with a little smile that makes it sweet.

It’s possible Nile’s in over her head, here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the nicky cooking show returns, at last! except it's kind of the joe cooking show. I will put my real quiche opinions in the bonus chapter, I promise.


	6. coffee

###  **after**

Andy and Quynh weren’t even asleep.

“What the fuck,” Joe grumbles. “You’re over forty.”

He is, of course, upset that his whole sleep schedule will be fucked up tomorrow, less than forty-eight hours before school starts back up again. He’s also upset he didn’t get his post-coital cuddles, and Nicky’s pretty angry about that himself if he’s being honest.

Nicky’s pretty angry about a lot of things right now. 

He’s not used to the volatility of his own emotions, right now, how he continues to oscillate between sadness for all Booker has suffered and anger at what Booker has done to them.

It’s good, then, that Andy is offering him a much easier target for his rage.

“You knew?” He asks her, as soon as she’s in through the door, before Joe has even given her anything to eat. “You knew and you didn’t tell us?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Andy says calmly, accepting her plate of not-really-quiche (Nicky knows he should make his own pastry, alright, but there isn’t enough time in the world and he didn’t know they would be having guests or midnight snacks and he deserves an award for pulling together a vegetarian dish that everyone present can eat on such short notice).

“Oh, great,” Joe says. “You weren’t sure. That _not sure_ was enough to watch us cry over his fucking empty coffin instead of telling us there was some chance he was alive? That’s really comforting. After everything we’ve--”

“After everything we’ve been through?” Andy asks, laughing lightly. “What, college?”

“We’ve known each other more than a decade,” Joe says, softer than he means to.

Joe’s anger is rapidly turning to hurt, and Nicky wants to claw his own eyes out.

“Yeah, and you’re all…” Andy trails off, gesturing around her at their living room.

“All what, Andy?” Nicky snaps.

She shrugs. “You know, domestic. Settled. You don’t really have much to do with the seedier side of things. I knew whatever was going on was shady, I didn’t want you involved.”

“Well, thanks for making that decision for us,” Joe snaps. “Glad to hear what my friendship means to you.”

Nicky rests a hand on his shoulder, but Joe shrugs it off, heads back for the kitchen, for more coffee, presumably. 

“Look, I didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Andy calls after him. “I didn’t have a lot to go on, at first.”

“How did you find us?” Booker asks. “Out of professional curiosity? I thought I got rid of everything in the apartment that could be a giveaway.”

“You did,” Andy agrees. “The whole upstairs of your apartment was empty when I went to check for a next of kin ten minutes after the accident. That was the giveaway.”

“Ah,” Booker winces. 

“Also, I bribed your paramedic,” Andy adds with a grin.

Nile barks a laugh. “Told ya,” she says, slapping Booker on the shoulder.

The casual intimacy of it makes Nicky recoil internally. He’d hoped for that, for Booker, eons ago, when he thought he knew the man. Now...well. He doesn’t know what he’s hoping for.

“Also,” Andy adds, “point of interest, one of your online accounts uses your real name. Your old name.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Booker says, heartfelt. “I was so fucking careful.”

Andy inspects her fingernails, grinning to herself. “Yeah, well,” she says. “Next time maybe watch out who your Sky Sports bills are going to. Thanks for that, by the way. We’ve been enjoying the darts championship this year.”

Nicky throws his hands up in disgust. He remembers, a long time ago, when Joe and Booker had first gotten friendly over football, that Booker had been the one to invite them over to watch it. 

“Really?” He asks. “Did you really trust our friendship so little that you couldn’t just _ask us to get Sky Sports_?”

“I didn’t think of that,” Booker says, cheeks going pink. “Anyway, that’s not the important question.”

As one, Joe and Nicky snort at the dismissal, but Booker has already turned to Andy.

“Why,” he asks, entirely casually. “did you sell us out?”

Joe drops his coffee cup, ceramic and liquid splashing out everywhere.

Nile flinches, reaching for the back of her jeans.

She’s armed.

She came into their apartment, as a guest, with a weapon. 

“Sell you out?” Andy asks with a frown, ignoring the noise.

“Caught sight of my handler in downtown Sofia,” Nile says, watching as Joe mops up the mess and picks up the ceramic. “Sébastien hacked her email account, she said she got her info on us from a PI in Hamburg living in his old apartment.”

“Well, I didn’t give it to her,” Andy says, arms crossed. “She must have had a trail on me.”

“I thought that sort of thing was your job,” Booker says, frustration leaking into his tone.

“Yeah, well, the PI stuff I do doesn't involve a lot of computers, alright?” Andy says, slightly flushed. 

Quynh bumps her shoulder into Andy’s. “At least you’re not a cop,” she reminds Andy.

“Right,” Andy says, tilting her chin up again. 

“Fantastic,” Nicky drawls. “Now we’ve established that all of our friends lied to us, and the U.S. military still knows you’re both not dead and are probably hot on your heels. To our apartment. Where we will be implicated for all of your failure to make good decisions.”

When none of them answer, he hisses in disgust and stomps up the stairs.

“Well,” he hears Joe say behind him. “I guess we’re going to bed. Try not to commit any more crimes in our apartment. At least until we’re awake again.”

###  **during**

They don’t go back to sleep that night.

How could they?

Quynh makes pot after pot of strong tea in their kitchen, leaving the three of them to their mindlessness and fear. She’s the least close to this situation; she only met Booker once or twice on her visits, and unlike Andy, she’d never gotten to know him better.

None of them can claim to really know Nile.

“God, Nile,” Joe realizes out loud some time after five AM. “She must be staying somewhere. Or have family we should contact.”

“I don’t know if that’s our job,” Nicky says. “We told the police who she was, surely they inform her friends and relatives?”

Joe is instantly relieved at the thought of not having to call up strangers and tell them someone they loved might be dying. He doesn’t trust the feeling. It smacks of weakness.

“What if they can’t find anyone?” He asks. “We only told them her first name, nothing else, they don’t even know she was an Art History student, maybe we should call the University—”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Andy interrupts sharply.

Nicky glares at her, drawing closer to Joe. “Let’s wait until we at least know how she’s doing,” he suggests gently, and Joe knows they’re right, he knows it in his brain, but he usually trusts his gut, and his gut is telling him that everything is _wrong_.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I just don’t know—”

Nicky strokes through his hair, messing it up even more than it already was. “I know, love,” he says soothingly. “I know.”

Joe melts against him, grateful beyond reason for his comfort, guilty at the same time that he is not offering any in return. He is at sea, unsure of what to do with himself. He’s led a blessed life, he knows, both his parents and his siblings healthy and happy, his beautiful husband the same, the only deaths he’s experienced the consequence of old age and illness. Sad, but natural. Nothing and no one has told him how to act now, with one of his closest friends, a man barely five years his senior, floating between life and death, and all he can do is bury his face in Nicky’s shoulder to hide his fear.

###  **before**

Booker is not sure how he found himself here.

On a logical level, he is aware that he is here because Andy asked, because Nile asked, because all of them said yes to this. On a karmic level, he’s very aware this is not something he deserves. 

Andy would say that karma doesn’t exist, which is her prerogative. Booker kind of needs to believe in some sort of cosmic justice, though, just to keep himself going. 

More to the point, if something like this were going to happen to him, he would have expected it to happen in the drug-fueled haze of his late twenties with him at the beck and call of one of the dealers he hung around, not now, when he’s past forty, with two women so out of his league it’s ridiculous. The only thing the two scenarios have in common is that it’s Booker on the receiving end. 

Nile is laid out beside him, wearing nothing but her black, lace-lined panties. That’s the most unbelievable part, actually. Andy, he’s seen naked a handful of times, ever since she and Quynh split and she began darkening his doorstep more often than Joe and Nicky’s when she’s in town. 

“It’s not that I don’t love them,” she complains sometimes. “It’s just that they love each other so much.”

Booker knows exactly what she means.

He doesn’t really have it in him to care, not when Nile’s naked skin is so close to his own he can feel the heat of it. Not when she’s stretched out, lips slightly parted, watching avidly as Andy slicks up the silicone cock dangling from her strap-on harness and presses into Booker.

Involuntarily, his head dips low enough that his forehead presses into Nile’s thigh.

“Okay?” Andy asks from behind him, trailing a gentle hand down his side.

“Yeah,” Booker gasps. 

Under his mouth, Nile’s skin pebbles with goosebumps. 

Andy pulls out, the ridged silicone dragging against the rim of Booker’s asshole. She pushes in again, and he cries out with it.

Nile’s hips shift a little, and her hand trails lower on her belly.

Booker’s aware it’s not exactly a trait most women view as attractive, how much he likes getting fucked. Adele certainly never expressed an interest, though she knew he swung both ways, but she had enough to put up with. No, this is a side to himself Booker has only explored after he died and his marriage ended. He may have been a terrible husband, but he never betrayed her that way. For a while, he had experimented with hook-ups and casual sex, but he’d found that a lot of partners expected him to top based solely on his size. He wasn’t opposed, but there was still an itch it didn’t scratch, and relationships were off the table for fear of letting someone too close and putting them in danger. For fear of blowing his own cover. For the last few years, he’s done most of his experimenting alone, until Andy decided to change that.

It’s been a refreshing change of pace.

Booker sobs into Nile’s skin as Andy really gets going, a soft push and pull of a rhythm. She can give it to him harder - she might, if he begs her - but he knows it’s more difficult with the strap-on than with an actual cock because she can’t quite tell when she might be hurting him.

“There you go,” Andy laughs breathlessly behind him. “Does that feel good?”

“Yes,” Booker tells her, and then again, “yes,” because he’d hitched his hips up that one missing half-inch and she’s driving right into his prostate now.

Nile’s hand slides lower, past the waistline of her underwear. “You look amazing like this,” she tells him, and the praise makes Booker shudder. He knows he’s not hard to read, not like this. Fuck, Nile could probably put him on a leash and lead him right into Guantanamo Bay right now if she just keeps telling him he’s good. 

Her free hand scrubs through his hair and kisses her thigh desperately.

Andy changes her rhythm, sacrificing speed for depth, and Booker groans right into the tantalizing space between Nile’s legs.

“You know,” Andy says, tone unfairly even and warm, “I bet he’d help you out with that, if you asked.”

Booker can’t lift his head up enough to see Nile’s expression, but there’s a laugh in her voice. “Yeah, Sébastien? Think you can concentrate enough to help me out?”

“Please,” he begs.

Andy has to pull back for a moment while Nile squirms out of her panties, and Booker can’t help but press soft kissed into her knees, her thighs, unable to express in words his gratitude that she’s giving him this, showing him this vulnerability, even though he has done nothing to deserve her trust.

“How are we doing this?” Nile asks, and Booker manages to look up at her just in time to spot the fleeting insecurity she tamps down as she asks. 

“What would you like?” Andy asks back, settling against Booker’s back again, the wet, cool trail of the dildo between his legs a tease and a reminder.

Nile doesn’t have an answer, pauses, considering. Her legs draw tighter together, as if the discussion is reminding her she’s naked in front of them.

“May I eat you out?” Booker says, aware he sounds like an idiot and uncaring. 

“Yeah, that’ll work,” Nile sighs, and her lovely thighs part again, allowing him to find his space between them again. “He any good?” She asks Andy.

Andy doesn’t answer, but she does slide the dildo back into Booker just as he gets into position between Nile’s legs. She wouldn’t know anyway, he’s never done this for her, she won’t let him no matter how much he begs when he’s out of his mind because she’s fucking him just right.

He’s trying very hard to not give up some sense of rationality entirely, now, to not slide into his basest instincts when she might need him to stay sane and aware that this is all just a ruse, but it’s a losing battle when he gets his first taste of Nile, her fingertips paused just above her sex, as if she’s ready to push him away at a moment’s notice.

He’ll let her, if that’s what she wants, but his stomach goes molten with the desire to prove to her how good he can be, how soft, how gentle, if she’ll just let him.

She relaxes to the touch of his tongue slowly, each kitten-lick he takes around her clit as she acclimatizes to him.

“That’s it, Booker, nice and slow,” Andy says behind him. “Work her up to it.”

Nile laughs breathlessly and Booker dares to quicken his pace a little, just to be contrary.

Andy punishes - or maybe rewards? - him with a sharp snap of her hips and he groans into Nile’s cunt. She shudders around him.

Almost without his notice, one of her hands inches back into his hair, stroking it back from his face, pulling him a little bit harder against her. He licks directly across her clit and her legs twitch.

It’s hard to stay steady, with Andy railing into him from behind, with his brain slowly reducing into a muddy mess of synapses. He gives it his best shot, though, he knows steady is the best way to get a girl off.

Nile seems to appreciate it, huffing soft sighs, carding her gentle fingers through his hair.

He hadn’t realized how tense he is until he starts to let himself enjoy it. But then Andy’s thrusts send him deeper into the mattress, her withdrawals pulling him back as he works to keep his head steady at Nile’s cunt, and he’s so hard his heartbeat is pulsing in his dick where it’s sliding against the sheets.

He makes some sort of noise, eyes snapping open at the understanding that he’s not just a tool for their pleasure, he’s a live wire trapped between them, but it doesn’t matter because all he can see is Nile’s skin and all he can taste is Nile’s arousal and all he can feel is her strong legs around his ears, he soft hand in his hair, the cock in his ass.

“That’s it,” Andy croons behind him. “Let yourself go.”

Nile’s hand clenches tight in his hair and he sobs, working her over faster.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, Sébastien…”

When she comes, her thighs draw tight around his head, holding him in place, trapping his whimpers against her cunt as he licks and licks and licks, tongue gone numb, chin wet with her and with his own saliva. 

“Don’t stop,” she gasps, “just keep--”

He could use the arm not desperately clenched on her hip to touch himself, to give himself some relief where he’s throbbing and leaking and aching.

He uses it to slide two fingers into her instead, forcing his useless, overworked mouth to keep going. 

She cries out for him, still clenching from her first orgasm as he works her up to a second. His thighs and knees are aching from where Andy’s kept him spread wide, his wrist is clicking at this angle.

None of it matters.

Nile seizes up, her body an arch.

She makes a noise - a guttural moan - presses herself harder into his face. Andy fucks in just then, pushing him from the other side, nailing into his prostate.

He comes, just like that, shooting into the sheet he’s been rubbing against. The friction almost burns as his sensitivity ramps up and he thinks a tear might have leaked out from his eyes.

He’s definitely sobbing, he realizes, when Nile pushes his head away at last, drawing in deep breaths so frantically they have to make noise.

Andy fucks in again and he cries out, spent dick twitching uncomfortably. “Stop, stop,” he says with what little breath he has.

She pulls back immediately. “What is it?” She asks. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he says, “No, I just came, it’s too much.”

Her laugh is more of a feeling than a sound against his back. 

“Shit,” Nile says somewhere above him, and he props himself up to look at her properly. She’s smiling, legs still splayed out, breathing hard. 

“That bad?” He asks.

She slaps his shoulder lightly. “Don’t fish for compliments.” The bedsheets bunch under her as she rolls to the side - her side, the side she slept on, leaving him to collapse into the empty space, joints turned to water. He’s going to care that he’s lying in a puddle of his own come eventually. Just not quite yet. 

“Can I do anything for you, Andy?” He asks into his pillow.

Andy laughs. “I doubt you could if you wanted to, Book. Anyway, you know I don’t like that.”

“Mm,” he agrees, because as much as she likes to make him scream, she doesn’t really like being touched in return. He’s pretty sure it’s the ex-girlfriend thing. Selfishly, he’s glad for it right now, because his limbs aren’t working.

The last thing he hears before he drifts off is the buzz of Nile’s cell phone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys *waves* so I have finally written all the "after" sections, minus the epilogues, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get the rest done soonish, but, y'know. Work. Life.
> 
> Anyway hope you enjoyed the hardest sex scene I have ever written. It took me so long I can no longer tell you if I even like it.


	7. pink sauce

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slight content warning for Nile having a panic/anxiety attack

###  **after**

It becomes very quickly apparent they’re both too keyed up for sleep.

The streetlights outside are starting to flicker on as the early - very early - morning professionals starting to get into their cars and go to work. 

Joe lies on his side, not quite touching Nicky, because Nicky is a tense line of anger under the covers. Every ten minutes or so, Nicky will let out a quiet huff of frustration, turn onto his other side, and try again.

It’s not working.

When a car horn outside shocks them both out what had been, at most, a light doze, Nicky groans. He throws the covers off and heads for the bathroom. In moments, the shower turns on.

Joe is comfy, he could probably sleep now he’s not so focused on Nicky. On the other hand, he never got to have a shower, before. Or, well, after. He follows Nicky into the bathroom, crowds into the shower stall, the curtain with the little cartoon unicorns on it sticking to his legs. 

“Sorry I kept you up,” Nicky says.

Joe shrugs. “Not your fault.” It is, strictly speaking, Nicky’s fault he’s awake, but it’s not Nicky’s fault that Nicky’s awake, so Joe is going to be nice about it.

Nicky sighs, tipping his head back into the stream of water.

Joe studies Nicky for a long while, his drawn face, his clenched jaw, even with the hot spray of the shower against his back to relax him.

He takes his soft penis in his hand and pokes it into Nicky’s hip.

“Boop,” he says.

Nicky startles, and stares at Joe for a long moment. “Why would you _do_ that?” he asks.

Joe shrugs. “You’re so upset. You need to relax.”

“And you thought that would make me relax?”

“It was more of an impulse than a concrete plan,” Joe admits.

Nicky shakes his head in disbelief.

For a long moment, they just look at each other. Joe’s glad of that, at least, that Nicky’s mind is on him, on here and now.

He presses his penis against Nicky’s other hip.

“Boop,” he says again.

Nicky stares at him for another long moment, and then he cracks. The first startled exhale of the laugh takes him by surprise, but by the time his brain has caught up to this instinctual reaction to Joe doing silly things, he’s leaning against Joe, unable to catch his breath from laughter.

“You are an idiot,” he gets out between deep belly laughs that spark joy in Joe’s heart.

“Yes,” he says. “Absolutely. I am an idiot.”

“You’re my idiot,” Nicky tells him, which is an assurance Joe would walk over hot coals to hear.

“Boop,” Nicky says, and presses the soft, squishy head of his penis to Joe’s hip.

It takes them another ten minutes to stop laughing enough to actually start soaping each other up.

Nicky leans against him heavily as Joe runs soapy hand up and down his back. Joe hides his smile in the curve of Nicky’s shoulder. 

“Christ, Yusuf,” Nicky moans. “We should do this more often.”

Joe agrees wordlessly, a pleased noise rumbling out of his throat. “I have no objection to taking care of you,” he tacks on. “Especially when you took care of me so well, earlier.”

Nicky snorts against his skin. “Hardly selfless, given that I got to fuck you.”

“Mm,” Joe sighs, remembering. “Speaking of things we should do more often.”

The huff of Nicky’s half-amused, half-exasperated exhale is lost in the heat of the shower. “Now?” Nicky asks innocently.

Joe shrugs. “I wouldn’t complain.” He would, a little - his ass twinges, and he doesn’t want to get fucked again - but he’s pretty sure Nicky’s bluffing.

Nicky leans back and looks up at Joe. His eyes are dark and serious. “Wouldn’t you,” he says. 

“Well,” Joe hedges.

“Because,” Nicky says, pressing close to Joe. “I’d like it if you could fuck me into not thinking.”

His cock is pressed against Joe’s hip, and it’s no longer funny.

As a rule, Joe tries to not get his hair wet when he’s not washing it, because it goes frizzy and awful, but kissing Nicky is worth getting his head soaked, because Nicky goes pliant under his hands and mouth, grabbing for Joe, desperate. Joe’s well aware that’s not about him. It’s still nice.

“I’ll wait for you in bed,” he promises, and slips out of the shower.

Not trusting himself to stay in the mood if he gets back under the covers, Joe walks over to the window, towel around his hips. 

The glass storefront of the bakery inside the store across the street just got fixed before the holidays, after Booker had driven into it with his car. Joe had been glad to not see the reminder in the form of a construction site every day. Now, knowing that Booker smashed that glass entirely on purpose, a shiver runs down his spine.

He turns away with conscious effort. He’s supposed to make Nicky stop thinking, not start himself.

Watching Nicky come in from the shower, damp hair and unselfconscious nudity, is a good start to that.

They’ve long passed the point where being naked together is nerve-wracking, or even noteworthy. It’s not that Joe isn’t attracted to Nicky’s body, it’s that his feelings for Nicky are of a nature that attraction is incidental, a nice coincidence he remembers every now and again, like now, when Nicky bends over to get out the lube and a condom and his ass is displayed in its full, glorious roundness. Joe would love everything about Nicky no matter what; he loves the little pouch of belly he gets around the holidays and tries to work off the rest of the year, the thickness of his thighs. He loves them on days he finds them sexy and wants to rub his face into Nicky’s thighs, and he loves them on days he wants to cuddle Nicky fully clothed and run his hands up and down his legs just to enjoy the reality of Nicky. 

It is gratifying to know he can still be bowled over by a sharp stab of lust when Nicky turns, raises an eyebrow at him, and gets on all fours on the bed.

“Fuck, Nicky,” he says, heartfelt.

It’s been a while since they’ve fucked twice in one night, given that they’re both getting older and life doesn’t always allow them as much time to just be together as they’d like. It’s nice to remember they still can.

“That’s the idea,” Nicky says, because he just can’t help himself.

Joe growls somewhere in his throat and pounces. 

The skin of Nicky’s neck is sensitive, somewhere between ticklish and erogenous, and like this, Joe can exploit it to the best of his ability, rubbing the coarseness of his beard into Nicky’s neck until his shudders with laughter and then sucking at the same skin harshly until Nicky groans, tilting his head back for Joe.

With the fingers of one hand slicked, Joe keeps his mouth on Nicky, trying to keep all of him occupied, all of him sensate, all of him in the here and now.

By the way Nicky groans, “faster,” he wants the same.

Still, it’s been a while since he’s fucked Nicky like this, so he takes it slow, preps Nicky on one finger, on two, on three, taking his time, fucking Nicky just like that, with his hand. 

“Joe,” Nicky groans. “I told you to make me stop thinking, not drive me insane.”

Joe grins against the skin of his neck. “But you like when I drive you insane,” he points out, crooking his finger just to prove the point.

Nicky humps back against him, panting.

The bed moves with him, but Joe makes an executive decision to not care about that. There’s something satisfying in making the bed shake because they want each other so much. Makes Joe’s untouched cock twitch a little.

He probably can’t tease Nicky much longer, so he strokes himself with his free hand, hard and rough and utilitarian, just enough to get him hard, just enough to get the condom on. They don’t need it, not really, but it’s the middle of the night and involved clean-up is not something either of them want. 

“You going to fuck me already?” Nicky asks over his shoulder, teeth bared, neck a mess of beard burn and spit.

“Thinking about it,” Joe teases as he slides in slow and stays put.

It’s part politeness to stay still for a while, let Nicky get his bearings, but as of a certain point, it turns from consideration to aggravation, and that’s Joe’s favorite part. When Nicky starts making wordless noises of frustration, fucking himself back on Joe’s cock, that’s not ever going to not get Joe ridiculously hot.

“Fuck, baby,” he sighs. “Look at you, so desperate for me to fuck you.”

Nicky moans.

“Taking it so well, such a good boy…” It’s a stroke of good luck that Joe’s tendency to unabashedly shower his sexual partners in praise and dirty talk is exactly the kind of thing that makes Nicky tighten down around him, moaning. It’s also entirely possible that being with Nicky so long has made their kinks mesh together.

Either way, Joe is forever grateful for the way Nicky goes wild when he runs his mouth.

It makes his job that much easier.

He starts fucking Nicky properly, then, slow and hard, getting really deep, just to hear those breathless cries Nicky can’t help when he gets really into it. He hasn’t even reached for his own cock yet.

“Fuck me more,” Nicky demands breathlessly, hips thrusting back sharply. 

Joe pulls him up by the shoulders, until he’s bracing himself on the headboard, and fucks him harder. 

The angle makes Nicky wail.

The bed groans under them.

Fuck, there’s a reason they usually do this on the couch. But the couch is occupied, full of war criminals and drug runners and Joe abruptly remembers that he’s fucking pissed and Nicky wants him to let it out, so he does.

“Joe,” Nicky groans, from so deep in his chest it makes Joe shiver even as he keeps his breakneck pace, banging the bed into the wall.

“That good, my love?” Joe murmurs in his ear between pants for breath. “That what you wanted? Fuck you hard enough to stop thinking? Make you go crazy for me?”

“Yes,” Nicky hisses out. “Yes, please, please.”

“So good for me,” Joe tells him.

The left bedpost cracks into the wall at the same time Nicky screams.

Joe is clumsy, fumbling for his cock around the side of his hip. Nicky shudders when Joe grips him, gasps out in shock when Joe uses the other hand to slap his ass. Joe’s rhythm falters, but it’s worth it.

“Your ass is perfect,” Joe grits out, “so perfect for me.” He jerks Nicky unevenly, feeling the clench of Nicky’s thighs above his own.

“Joe,” Nicky gasps. “Joe, Joe, yes, yes--” and eventually his mouth is just hanging open, slight noises escaping on each of Joe’s thrusts in. 

Joe spreads his legs a tiny bit further, forces Nicky’s legs just that inch more apart in turn, and fucks in hard.

Nicky yells as his come sprays all over the headboard, dripping down Joe’s fist. 

Joe wants to slow down, he really does, he knows how sensitive it gets, to be fucked through orgasm, but he’s physically incapable, so close he can taste it, thighs burning. He bites down on Nicky’s shoulder as he comes in jolts, filling the condom.

“Fuck,” he pants. 

It takes him a moment to pull back. His knees are fucking killing him. He throws the condom vaguely towards the bathroom and slumps back onto the bed.

Nicky laughs breathlessly. 

“Satisfied?” Joe asks him, peering over.

“Totally thoughtless,” Nicky agrees, and drags Joe around to hold him close as they fall asleep.

###  **during**

The safe house in Sofia is nicer than Booker remembers.

Granted, the last time he was here he was in detox, mostly he saw the inside of the toilet bowl, but he’s pleasantly surprised the light is okay, the couch is big enough for him...it’s not bad, all told.

Of course, that doesn’t make him feel any better.

His eyes are gritty and he’s sore from being cramped up in a car for such a long time. He stinks of sweat and smoke, and he wants nothing more than to take a shower and lie down for as long as he can stand the couch.

When he wakes up, Nile is standing over him. 

“You can sleep in the bed, you know,” she says, sounding a little amused. “I’ve seen it all before.”

“Didn’t wanna intrude,” he slurs. 

The couch dips as she sits down beside him.

“Honey,” she tells him, “I’m gonna need you to do a lot more intruding.”

He hadn’t thought he could be so charmed by how American she is.

“Oh?” He asks, forcing himself upright and out of his blanket nest.

“Yeah,” she says. “Funny thing about whiplash, I can’t lift my arms behind my head.”

“Mm,” he says. “So...don’t lift your arms behind your head?”

She gives him a look. “I’m gonna need to change my look, my face might be in the news,” she points out. “Plus, there’s probably bits of glass, and blood, in my hair.”

“Ah.”

“Now, I’m gonna guess you don’t have the first clue what to do with my hair, but I’m gonna need you to learn fast.”

He watches YouTube videos on haircare after making sure the VPN he installed on the laptop is working while she cooks.

“What are you making?” He asks, pausing the video when his eyes start unfocussing. He’s still so tired.

“Pasta pink sauce,” she says, like that’s a normal thing to say.

“Pink sauce,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” she says.

“Uh,” he says.

“It’s just noodles and sauce,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It won’t kill you.”

“I believe you,” he says, because she’s almost definitely not going to kill him after all that, “but what is pink sauce?”

“Tomato paste and cream,” she says, licking the spoon she’s been stirring with.

It is, he reflects, going to be a problem, how charmed he is by how American she is.

Later, he unwinds her braids as carefully as he can, helps her wash and condition her hair and waits with her until they can wash the conditioner out. It nearly chokes him, how intimate it is, to stand behind her in the tiny shower and help her wash the conditioner out of her hair. He’s too tired to feel sexual about it, he’s too scraped raw to think anything else than that she’s trusted him with this and it makes his heart hurt.

“You’ll sleep in the bed, with me,” she says, afterwards, when her hair is dry and wrapped up in a scarf.

He doesn’t protest.

###  **before**

Nile locks herself in the bathroom for half an hour and turns on the shower while she sits on the toilet lid and shakes.

Sometime after she stops hyperventilating, there’s a knock on the door.

“Nile?” Sébastien’s gentle voice asks. “I sent Andy over to feed the cat, we’re alone.”

Nile wrenches the door open.

“My handler called,” she says.

“I hate her,” she says.

“She _likes_ what we do,” she says.

Finally: “I told her I’d made contact. With you. She’s expecting me. I didn’t know what else to say.”

Sébastien says nothing.

“I only have three options left, don’t I,” Nile says. “I call it in, get you imprisoned and forget I ever met you, I turn whistleblower and probably get imprisoned myself, or I ask you to fake my death.”

Sébastien shrugs, coming into the bathroom to sit at the edge of the bathtub. “I only have one choice left,” he points out. “I fake my death again and vanish. Or I get taken in.”

Nile blows out a long breath, frustrated. There are tears building hot behind her eyes.

“What?” Sébastien asks, his voice despicably gentle.

“Your kids hate you, you know,” Nile tells him. She doesn’t know why she says it, except that she’s tired of being scared and confused and hating all her options.

He doesn’t look at her, but his entire body tightens up.

“I read all the interviews,” she continues. “They blame you for everything, for having to leave Marseille, for their mom having to work full-time, for their uncle dying.”

“Good,” he says. “They should.”

Nonplussed, Nile falls silent. She traces the line of tile in the bathroom with her big toe. She swallows. She bends down to straighten the bathmat, mostly unnecessarily. Her eyes are blurring over.

“How can you do it?” She bursts out. “How can you just act like it’s fine that you’ll never see them again? How can you be alright with them feeling like that? What’s wrong with you?”

Booker turns around to face her, then. He’s pulled on his sweatshirt, because it’s colder here, now, than it was an hour ago, when he was spread out in front of her, and it makes him look soft. “Are you done?” He asks. “Because we’re kind of in a hurry here. This is your decision and you need to make it now if I’m going to get things organized.”

“What will you do if I say no, I’m taking you in after all?” She challenges.

He smiles at her softly, and she hates him. “That’s not who you are, Nile,” he says.

“You don’t even know me,” she says, sobs sticking in her throat, fighting to escape. 

“I know you enough,” he says. “You can’t go back with your eyes open.”

“I don’t know what else I can do,” she says. “I’m not -- do you know how long Chelsea Manning has spent in solitary confinement? I can’t do that.”

“Give yourself a bit more credit, chérie,” he tells her, tilting her chin up. “Right now, I’ve got to escape, because your boss is closing in on me. You can either come with me or not.”

If she comes with him, she’ll never see her family again.

If she doesn’t, chances are, her family will end up on the wrong side of the U.S. government along with her.

If she doesn’t, she has to go to the press; she has to do something big, and public, to keep herself safe and to make up for what she’s done wrong.

She doesn’t have the first idea of where to start with that.

“Can you help me fix what I’ve done?” She asks. “Can you...I don’t know, use your weird hacker/forger skills to help me make amends? If I come with you?”

He looks at her steadily. “I can try,” he says.

Later, Nile will remember very little of the next day. Mostly, she’ll recall awkwardly discussing pegging techniques with Andy while Sébastien goes out to “arrange things”. She’ll recall the poké bowls he claims to be specifically craving, forcing Andy to drive him to the restaurant that doesn't deliver because Andy very clearly saw him drink a beer and wouldn’t let him drive, entirely so that Nile can go upstairs and box up all of his papers, all of his books, all of his good deeds. She’s still feeling tender, emotional and useless, and clumsily offers to move the boxes out from there and to the basement she knows he has because the door to it is in the kitchen and she’d thought it was a pantry and opened it looking for a snack only to find a set of stairs. Sébastien just shakes his head and says it wouldn’t work, the basement is shared with his neighbours. So Nile will remember boxing everything up and then just leaving it there until they can get rid of Andy for long enough to take it all to a storage unit, sweating in the attic and feeling hollow under her skin. She’ll remember making a fool of herself in front of his neighbours when they return unexpectedly while she’s feeding the cat and Sébastien is off meeting a contact he claims will help them.

She’ll recall, between all that, falling asleep in one of Sébastien’s T-shirts, ridiculously huge on her, and feeling somewhat comforted by his big body beside hers.

Mostly, she’ll remember waking up in the half-light of the dawn and turning instinctively towards him, letting him hold her when she started crying and couldn’t seem to stop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for a very long time, all my notes on this chapter were just the words "penis boop"
> 
> I also don't know if pasta pink sauce is a thing anyone outside my family ever eats (they would probably say it is but they have fooled me before), but it is one of my all-time comfort foods.


	8. franzbrötchen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: this chapter intimates that Andy has a background involving working in intelligence and the recent conflicts in Crimea. It's very vague.

###  **after**

“Good _morning_ ,” Booker says with a grin when Nicky comes downstairs.

Nicky glowers at him. “Fuck you,” he says.

“I’m just impressed.” Booker holds his hands up innocently. 

“You didn’t happen to get some breakfast?” Nicky asks, ignoring that it’s almost three PM.

“I wanted to, but I was hampered by everyone thinking I crashed my car into the closest bakery and died.”

Right.

“Fine,” Nicky says. He grabs his keys and wallet out of the bowl Joe painted by hand at the paint-your-own-pottery shop they went to last year. It’s a little childish to slam the door on his way out, but he does it anyway.

Because their guests are two of the worst nationalities, French and an American, and because Andy has a rampant sweet tooth, Nicky picks up Franzbrötchen for everyone and nothing but white bread to go with them. At the last moment, he adds a seeded roll for Joe. 

He debates getting a cup of coffee and staying longer at the bakery to avoid Booker and Nile, but then decides he really ought to not do that.

It’s too late when he gets back anyway. 

Joe is already awake - for a certain definition of the word “awake” - and prodding at the coffee maker, trying to ignore Andy snickering over the mess of his hair where Nicky had run his hands through it, after, even though it was still wet and they both knew it would dry into frizz.

“Nicolò,” she crows when he gets back in. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I’ll show you what he had in him,” Joe mutters to the coffee machine in Arabic, forcing a laugh out of Nicky.

“We don’t mean to be rude,” Quynh chimes in delicately, over Andy and Booker’s protests that they absolutely mean to be rude. “I just think I speak for all of us when I say that the last thing we expected after last night was, uh.”

“Listening to you fuck savagely for like an hour,” Andy finishes bluntly.

“As a rule,” Nicky says, tossing the paper bag of pastries he now regrets purchasing for these people even more intensely at the kitchen table, “I prefer when you don’t expect anything to do with our sex lives. Or listen in. Or comment.”

“Hard not to listen in,” Booker says around a sip of coffee.

They’ll have to move apartments if they want kids, then, Nicky surmises. If the walls are that thin. It’s no surprise, and he’s not in a tenure-track position anyway, he was going to have to start job hunting in the spring and they had scheduled a serious talk about whether they even wanted to stay in Hamburg for sometime this month.

Now, who knows how harboring several criminals will impact his chances at getting a permanent job, let alone a professorship.

God, who knows how it will impact their chances at ever adopting.

The thought is a punch to the gut. Nicky’s not naive enough to believe that they won’t be scrutinized doubly - triply, even - what any other couple would get, because they’re gay, and because Joe is Muslim and has the temerity to look it. Adding in aiding and abetting two people who are supposedly dead, one of whom is a criminal and the other is whatever Nile is -- that will not help.

Andy rips open the bag and pulls out a Franzbrötchen. She bites into it, sighing with pleasure.

Nicky has to leave the kitchen for a moment.

Quynh finds him ten minutes later, smoking on the upstairs balcony. 

“What would Joe say?” She asks teasingly.

Joe would say _habibi_ , but he would say it in such a sad, forlorn tone of voice that Nicky would put his packet of shame cigarettes back into their hiding space between his boxer shorts and his socks, the only items of his clothing Joe doesn’t regularly steal, and not smoke for another four to six months.

“Joe wouldn’t say anything,” Nicky snaps. “Did you know?”

Quynh leans against the railing. “No,” she says.

Nicky takes another puff and doesn’t say anything.

“There’s a lot Andy doesn’t talk about often,” Quynh tells him eventually. 

Nicky is well aware of that. He taps at the end of his cigarette and watches the ashes float downwards. 

Of course Nicky remembers the time they’d been out for drinks at the pub two doors down from Quynh and Andy’s apartment in London and a man in a suit had sat down at the booth next to theirs. He’d raised his mug toward Andy in a toast. They’d never gone back to that pub, and Quynh and Andy had moved to a different part of London not long after. 

It had put into sharp focus, how strange it was that Andy was five years older than all of them and still just finishing her Master’s. And how oddly accentless her voice was. 

“It won’t exactly shake them off,” Joe had told Nicky at the time. “Andy’s probably under constant surveillance. That’s why she won’t be joining the police when she gets her degree.”

“I thought that was because she thinks the police are a protofascist organisation,” Nicky had commented, because he hadn’t known to take it seriously at the time, and also because Andy had said as much more than once when people asked her what she intended on doing with her degree in forensic science.

That was before 2014, when Andy had started changing the channel anytime coverage of the situation in Crimea came on; before her travelling east became more frequent; before her temporary split from Quynh, when they had liked to joke that she was fucking her way through Europe on the rebound because Joe was so traumatized by finding her strap-on even though they all knew she travelled light for other reasons, that she was always coming to Hamburg from Ukraine.

“Should I have asked her about it?” Nicky asks. “I always thought she didn’t want to talk about it, but if that’s why she hid _this_ from us--”

“No,” Quynh says. “I don’t think so.” She sighs deeply and turns around, leaning back against the railing with her elbows, studying Nicky’s face closely.

“What?” He asks.

“Do you realize,” she asks, “that you and Joe have been speaking as a unit all day?”

“Hm?”

“She hid this from _us_. Stop making comments about _our_ unexpectedly kinky sex life. You made decisions for _us_.”

“What’s your point?”

“Don’t you ever get _scared_ of that?” Quynh’s mouth is downturned as she says it, making the words come out louder and uglier than she expected. “What will be left of you if he leaves?”

“Joe won’t leave,” Nicky says instantly, instinctually, harshly.

Joe won’t, he’s not the kind. If Joe were ever unhappy - if he wanted to leave - he would tell Nicky, and they would work it out together. Nicky knows that down to the core of his bones. But the thought is still an ice-cold shiver down the back of his neck. 

“Of course it scares me,” he adds, a touch gentler. “I didn’t mean to be so reliant on someone else, back when we met, and it would destroy me if we ever ended, but I’ve never thought that fear was worth hiding from what we have.” He takes another deep drag of his cigarette. “You don’t know Joe at all if you think it wouldn’t destroy him, too.”

“I know,” Quynh says. “I know. It’s just hard to -- not to feel inadequate, next to the most perfect couple in the universe.”

Nicky stares at her. “Are you saying,” he says through clenched teeth, “that it’s _our fault_ all our friends are criminals and spies and _lying to us_ because we’re _happy_?”

“I mean that we love you, but Andy and I and I suppose Booker would not want to destroy what you have with our baggage.”

Nicky squishes the butt of the cigarette against the railing, watching the embers die. “Have you considered,” he asks the cigarette smudge, “that that is not your decision to make? Not when your secrets affect us as well? Not when Andy just let us...grieve when she knew better?”

Quynh opens her mouth to say something, but Nicky isn’t done.

“And have you considered that just because we don’t fight where you can see us doesn’t mean we’re perfect? It hasn’t been _easy_ all of the time, but we made a commitment to each other. That’s not even a rare thing, you don’t get to go blaming Andy’s mistakes on us--”

“I’m blaming them on myself,” Quynh cuts in.

Nicky pauses.

“I broke her trust,” Quynh says. “Or her heart, if you want to be poetic about it. I knew all the soft, sensitive parts of her, everything she’s been through, and I told her to leave because I was so scared of what it would do to me when she did. It’s my fault she didn’t trust any of us with this, because she’s just waiting for everyone else who loves her to treat her like I did. So. That’s why she didn’t tell you. Because you’re happy and good and she loves you and didn’t want you to tell her to leave.”

Nicky is quiet for a long time. 

What a mess they all make of each other, and for what?

“Is there anything else I should know?” He asks eventually. “Did you really stay in Hamburg because you’re on sabbatical? Or are you secretly an international jewel thief?”

She slaps him on the arm.

“I’ll go easier on Andy,” Nicky promises.

When they get back inside, Andy and Nile are discussing the best strategy going forward, hunched over the kitchen table. There are sheets of scribbled-on paper between them; Nile seems frustrated that Andy won’t entertain the idea of getting a journalist involved.

“I didn’t _want_ to be that kind of whistleblower either,” she’s growling out, “but it’s looking like my only option for safety is publicity.”

“Journalists are vultures,” Andy argues. “And publicity is fickle.”

Nile throws her hands up. “That’s what you said about every European government I suggested.”

Andy shrugs unrepentantly. “It’s true.”

Booker has his head pillowed on his hands. He must be exhausted. He hasn’t slept, yet, and before they got here, they were driving non-stop. The cat is winding around his ankles, demanding to be fed, and he reaches down to pet at Aramis’ head. Aramis instantly hisses and claws at his fingers. Booker sighs and puts his head back in his hands.

“Why don’t we all sit down in the living room,” Nicky suggests. “I’ll make some more coffee and we’ll go over all the options one at a time and find the one with the least issues.”

Nile shoots him a grateful smile.

Joe presses a kiss to his cheek as he heads out the kitchen door and for the cupboard they keep the nice coffee cups in.

This must all be doable somehow, Nicky thinks. He has Joe, that won’t change, and that’s really all he’s needed, the last few years.

He turns the coffee maker on and dumps the last of the beans into the grinder. They’re going to need more, with nights this long. He pushes past the others to grab his phone and enter the beans onto the digital shopping list he and Joe share as Joe piles the dishes onto the table.

Their eyes catch, and they share a little smile. 

They may not have been in on this, but they are in it now. Together.

Andy yells something from the kitchen. It’s so sudden and so loud, Nicky doesn’t register the word, only the noise. “What?” He asks dully.

Even as he asks, the word reaches his brain.

 _Duck_.

He hits the ground as the glass of their patio door shatters with the impact of the bullets. 

“Go!” Joe yells towards the kitchen, leaned up too far to catch sight of Andy and Quynh, Booker and Nile. “The basement, go--” 

His breath punches out as red blooms brightly on his shirt, eyes wide in surprise and pain.

“Joe!” Nicky yells, reaching out for him.

Joe’s beautiful lips start to form a word, the lines in his forehead creasing in confusion, but whatever he says is lost in the thunder of the glass of the remaining windows in the bottom floor of their apartment crashing to pieces and the pelt of the bullets against their furniture.

When Nicky dares to inch over toward Joe, he’s unconscious, pulse thready, soaked in blood and covered in glass shards. Their apartment is empty, and no matter how much Nicky screams for Andy, for Quynh, for Booker, for anyone to help, no one answers.

###  **during**

Nicky answers the phone, because Nicky is the most functional of them all by seven thirty in the morning, used to sleeplessness in the early morning. Also, it’s his phone.

He answers it in the kitchen, where no one else can hear it. Where Joe can’t hear it.

“I’m sorry,” he says down the line to the police officer speaking in clipped, quick German. “Could you speak English, please? You’re too fast for me.”

The officer sighs deeply, beleaguered. Nicky is irrationally angry at her. He does speak German, but not that quickly, not after a night of no sleep and constant terror, and not that strong a Hamburg dialect, with all its sharp consonants and flat vowels.

“Sorry,” he repeats.

“You were the neighbor of Mr. le Livre, yes?” She asks, the _th_ turning into a _d_ on her tongue.

“Yes,” Nicky confirms.

“I am sorry to inform you that Mr. le Livre and the woman he was with died on the way to the hospital,” she says. Her voice becomes almost human on the word _died_.

A noise comes out of Nicky’s throat, involuntary and rage-filled.

“I’m sorry to ask,” the officer says, and her voice has gone entirely gentle now. It makes Nicky hate her even more. “But we need someone to take care of Mr. le Livre’s personal effects. He doesn’t seem to have any family. Could we have you come in?”

“Alright,” Nicky agrees roughly. “When should we be there?”

“As soon as you can make it,” the officer says.

They take the subway.

“I don’t understand why it took them five hours to call us,” Joe says, for maybe the third time, fingers drumming on the metal pole in the center of the subway car.

Nicky shrugs.

There are dark circles under his eyes and he’s wearing the shirt he only ever wears when he truly needs comfort, the soft cotton blend with the worn-out collar and the somewhat faded logo of a band they had gone to see back in London, only a few months into their relationship. He knows what he looks like, and it makes the trip more unbearable than it already was, to feel the eyes of strangers on him.

The police station is crowded and loud and Nicky feels like his head is underwater, because he knows there is noise and there are people happening around him but he can’t seem to register any of it.

Joe grips his hand too hard.

They’re finally let into the office of the woman he talked to on the phone. On her desk, in a neat little tray that reminds Nicky of putting his valuables on the metal detector conveyor belt at the airport are Booker’s wallet, his cell phone, which looks broken beyond repair, and his keys with their fucking stupid l’OM keychain.

Nicky’s knees falter. It’s only Joe’s grip that keeps him upright.

“There was an incident at the morgue,” the policewoman says, in German once again, though at least somewhat slower. “I’m afraid the bodies are not -- recognizable. Can you confirm that these items belong to Sébastien le Livre?”

“Yes,” Joe says, and Nicky feels the tension in his skull shatter and tears build behind his eyes.

The policewoman sighs. “My condolences,” she says. “Thank you for coming in. I’ll give you a moment.”

She leaves them alone in her stuffy little office, crowded with color-coded binders and used coffee cups. Joe turns to Nicky, the keys gripped tightly in his hands, because there is nothing else he can do, because who else is he to turn to, and he says, “Booker promised we’d watch the game on Thursday.”

His voice is hoarse and his heart is on his sleeve and Nicky loves him so much it hurts to watch him hurt like this.

###  **before**

Going over to Joe and Nicky’s for pizza two days before he knows he’s going to be faking his own death, again, is strange.

Mostly it’s strange because a strange combination of Nile and his need to keep their covers and Andy’s absolute lack of shame cause everyone present know he’s slept with both Andy and Nile, and it feels very awkward, because Joe and Nicky absolutely know he does not possess the kind of personality or looks to charm either of them.

In a way, though, the strangest aspect is that it’s so normal.

Nicky cooks, and he and Joe tease each other in the way they do - loving, always loving, but always willing to laugh at and with each other as well - and Booker can _see_ Nile relax into it. 

It feels dangerous.

“We can always leave out the basement,” he jokes, trying to defuse the tension, trying to find an out.

He’s standing in front of the basement door, in point of fact, and leans toward it jokingly.

“Please stay,” Nicky says, waving his hand in -- in just the most Italian way Booker has ever seen him behave. “There’s too much food for just us.”

He wants, desperately, to ask. How was Italy? How was seeing his family? He knows, of course, that Nicky hasn’t seen them in years. He was always quite open about it. 

He never asked Booker to talk about his own family.

“Free food,” Booker jokes awkwardly, desperately. “Who could say no.”

“Dude,” Nile says around a mouthful. “This is delicious. Did you seriously just learn to cook for this guy?”

Nicky laughs shyly, rubbing the back of his neck. “I did,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t starving before, but I was microwaving everything. Lots of eggs on toast, too.”

“Your eggs on toast are magical, my love,” Joe tells him. His cheeks are flushed and it’s hard to tell if it’s the alcohol or the heat in the kitchen.

Nicky kisses his cheek and refills his wine glass. 

Booker swallows heavily. He looks at Nile out of the corner of his eye, because he can’t not.

He knows what sad, lonely people watching Joe and Nicky look like, when they’re not paying attention, because he and Andy take turns looking at them like that.

Nile has her chin propped up on her hand and she’s smiling gently, like she’s happy to see them.

She catches his eye and shoots him a wink.

This morning, when she’d finished crying, when she’d wiped her eyes and pulled away from him, she’d said, “God, it was a lot more fun when you were falling apart in _my_ arms.”

“You--you liked that?” He had asked.

“Mm-hm,” she’d said, straightening and stretching. “Hey, can I borrow some clothes?” 

“Uh-huh,” he’d said on autopilot, staring at the arch of her spine, wondering how someone could have realized she would lose her family and the entire life she’d built for herself and choosing it because it was the right thing to do. 

Her eyes had still been red, but she’d still smiled, grasped him by the chin and kissed him softly before raiding his closet.

“Have some more,” Nicky says, nudging another slice of pizza in his direction.

Booker takes it, rolling his eyes at Nile when he can’t see.

Nile hides a snicker behind her hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so Franzbrötchen are a northern German speciality. They're kind of like a squished-flat croissant filled with cinnamon sugar and also some orange juice? Idk I'll put a recipe in the bonus chapter they're delicious.
> 
> sorry for the cliffhanger, I'm going to try (the operative word being TRY) to upload the last couple chapters faster, but we'll see how that works out for me.
> 
> Andy's background is something I kinda struggled with, because I think she has reasons for behaving the way she does, but also that she is exactly as opaque with everyone about where/when she's from as she is in the movie. I chose her coming from/having to do with Crimea because location-wise, it matches Scythia and time-wise, the recent conflicts there and also the independence movement for Crimea in the 80s/90s matches my timeline for this fic. My rough idea of her backstory is that her parents/guardians worked for Crimean independence in the 80s/90s, which led to Andy growing up under/evading surveillance, which led to her becoming very politically active in the region herself, then becoming disenchanted and running away to England etc. But I don't know enough about it and it didn't really fit into the story. If I screwed this up entirely, please tell me.


	9. coq au vin

###  **after**

The first time Joe wakes up, his ears are ringing and he can’t hear anything anyone says before he falls asleep again. All he sees is Nicky’s concerned face floating in his line of sight. He tries to reach out, to reassure Nicky that it will all be alright, but he can’t.

The second time he wakes up, he’s groggy as all hell. He tries to turn over, just for five more minutes, but the bed under him jostles wrong, the IV drip pulls, his shoulder screams in agony.

“Nicky,” Joe mumbles, staring toward the slumped-over figure in the visitor’s chair.

“Nicky is asleep,” Maryam says from the other side of his bed. “Ibrahim nearly had to sedate him.”

“Maryam?” Joe asks, confused. 

He blinks hazily, trying to orient himself. Ibrahim is leaned back in the chair next to Nicky’s, snoring softly. Outside the door to his hospital room, Quynh is talking to someone on her cell phone, looking tired as she pushes her hair out of her face. He’s probably not dead, because he hurts a lot and he imagined the afterlife without this level of detail.

“What are you doing here?” He asks in the direction he heard Maryam’s voice from. He can’t seem to turn in that direction.

“Don’t _do_ that,” she says, hurrying into his line of sight. “You got shot, Yusuf. Of course I’m going to show up.”

“Oh,” Joe says, bemused. 

“ _Oh_ ,” she parrots. “We’ve been worried sick. You’re lucky Nicky called us first and not Mama and Baba. Their flight hasn’t gotten in yet.”

Joe groans. “Why’s my shoulder hurt?” He asks.

“Because you _got shot_ ,” Maryam says. Something wet trickles onto the hand attached to the arm he can’t move. He falls asleep again to the soft sound of her crying, desperately wishing he could comfort her but too tired to move his lips.

The third time Joe wakes up, Nicky is praying.

“I haven’t seen you do that in a long time,” Joe says, bemused. The last time was before Nicky’s Ph.D. defense, and it was more ironic than anything else.

“ _Joe_ ,” Nicky breathes out. His eyes are glassy with tears.

“Nicolò,” Joe says. “Nicolò, my heart, I’m here, please don’t cry.”

Nicky chokes on a laugh that might be a sob. 

“Don’t cry for me,” Joe tries again. “I promised to fill your years with joy and laughter.”

Nicky’s eyes close and he grasps Joe’s left hand in his own, kissing his palm. “Only you, my love,” he says, “would wake up from two days of unconsciousness to spout poetry at me.”

“Two days?” Joe asks. “Really?”

“Yes,” Nicky says. “Really. The bullet was--” he swallows thickly. “It was dangerously close to your neck. You lost a lot of blood, and the doctors kept you sedated for a while after surgery.” 

“Booker and Nile?” Joe asks, suddenly remembering. “Did they get awa--”

“Shh,” Nicky says, suddenly and intently, seconds before Ibrahim throws the door to the hospital room open. 

Joe’s parents follow close on his heels, talking a mile a minute, asking what on earth happened to him, and Joe is glad to slip back into unconsciousness to avoid the question.

The fourth time Joe wakes up, he needs to pee urgently. 

There’s no one in his room, so he presses the button on his bed and goes through an awful process with a bedpan and a harried nurse. 

She turns the TV on on her way out, presumably because he’s alone.

Nile’s face is plastered across the screen.

A German voiceover translates her heartfelt apologies for the destruction left in Hamburg in the wake of her flight, but Joe can hear her voice in English underneath. The American government, the blond newsreader says after the picture cuts back to her, has said that Nile’s handler was working alone, with no support from the state. The US does not condone military intervention in Germany. Lance corporal Nile Freeman has been honorably discharged and thanked for her service in uncovering this misuse of power.

Joe laughs until it hurts. It doesn’t take long.

“You’re awake,” Quynh says, paused in the doorway, paper cup of coffee in her hand.

“You look like shit,” Joe tells her.

She does; her long hair is pulled into some sort of approximation of a bun, but it’s falling apart on her. She’s wearing one of Nicky’s sweatshirts, which is too long on the sleeves and makes her look like she’s hiding a pregnancy in the massive belly pouch. There are dark circles under her eyes and smudges where her makeup must have once been.

She sits down next to his bed, sipping her coffee and grimacing. “You, on the other hand, look like a million dollars.”

Joe tries to shrug and immediately regrets it when his whole body tells him on no uncertain terms that that hurts too much. “Someone just had to help me pee,” he says. “I can’t look worse than I feel.”

Quynh looks to the TV. “So,” she says.

“Nile’s doing well.”

Quynh shrugs. “She’s still being questioned. She and Andy have been inside some government building for the last two days.”

“What about--” Joe starts, but the door swings open again and Joe’s family descends. Nicky is trapped between Ibrahim and Joe’s father, which is awful, because they always descend into some sort of moral or philosophical debate that makes them all sound like assholes. 

The next few hours are lost to a slow rehashing of how Joe ended up being shot, with most of the important details being omitted, and figuring out where exactly Joe and Nicky are going to live now that their apartment has no windows left.

Joe wishes he could fall asleep again.

At least he doesn’t have to go to work for a few weeks.

It’s dark by the time his family returns to their hotel, promising to book an extra room for Joe and Nicky, at least until their place gets fixed.

Nicky collapses into the chair by Joe’s side with a sigh when they’re gone.

“You should have gone with them,” Joe laments. “Get some rest.”

“Light of my eyes,” Nicky says darkly, “if you think you are leaving my sight for the next month at least, you are sorely mistaken.”

“Nicolò,” Joe says as gently as he can. “The doctors said I would be fine. Ibrahim said I would be fine.”

Nicky straightens the starchy sheet that isn’t really keeping Joe warm. “There was so much blood,” he says quietly. “You were -- you weren’t responding. I didn’t know whether I should use my hands to call an ambulance or put pressure on the wound and whatever I chose I thought I would lose you.”

Joe reaches for Nicky with his good hand, pushing the bit of hair that’s got a bit too long over his ear. “Ibrahim says you saved my life.”

“Ibrahim wasn’t there.” Nicky’s voice is hollowed-out.

Joe remembers how he feels. He’s been there, watching Nicky convalesce in a hospital bed and feeling too keenly what it was to have almost lost him. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Nicky laughs. “It’s not your fault.”

Joe rubs his thumb over Nicky’s knuckles. “I’m sorry you had to go through that without me.”

Nicky’s exhale is shaky enough that it’s better they just sit together quietly for the next while.

Around midnight, Andy and Nile slip into the room.

Joe frowns woozily. He’d just sort of fallen asleep, even if Nicky refuses to share the bed because he doesn’t want to jostle the drip Joe’s on. Somehow, Nicky’s breathing steadily in the plastic chair, eyes shut, head drooping forward. His neck is going to hurt so much.

“Aren’t visiting hours over?”

Andy shrugs. “If I can bully the BND into letting me out of an interrogation room, I can bully a nurse into letting me into a hospital room.”

“Famous last words,” Nile snorts. “Respect your nurses.”

“Are you alright?” Joe asks.

Andy nods. “Not to be a dick, but you getting shot might have been the best thing for us. Nile’s out of trouble, and her handler’s been taken into custody.”

“I saw, on the news. She was acting alone?”

Nile looks away.

“That’s what they’re saying,” Andy shrugs. “Sounds like an excuse to me, but you don’t just go calling the U.S. president a filthy liar.”

“Nile,” Joe asks, as Nicky starts to stir beside him. “Where’s Booker?”

Nile’s eyes are glittering, but the room is dark and Joe can’t be sure if she’s crying.

“He’s been extradited to France,” she says. “Now that he’s not dead.”

Joe swallows thickly. He wishes he could move the hand not holding Nicky. His neck itches. Sweat prickles all over him. “He’s--”

“There hasn’t been any news,” Andy interrupts. “He was taken into custody and the French legal system will have to sort out what to do with him.”

“Hard to say if more people in prison or out of it want him dead,” Nile adds, and as the only one of them who knows jack shit about Booker’s past, Joe’s inclined to trust the dread in her tone. “He, um. Wait a sec.”

She pulls out her phone, thumbs flying across the controls. “He sent this before they confiscated his phone.”

It’s a video, self-recorded. It’s three full minutes long, but Nile skips ahead to the two and a half minute mark. 

“-- don’t blame yourself, chérie, I should have turned myself in years ago. And don’t you dare wait for me, I’m already too old for you,” Booker on the video is saying, running a hand through his greasy hair. His shirt is unbuttoned over a white T-shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and his arms are covered in deep red scratches. Joe sneaks a glance at Nile, but she’s looking away again, just holding the phone for him to see. 

“Anyway,” Booker’s voice continues, tinny and far-away. “One last favor. Would you -- could you tell Joe and Nicky that I’m sorry? For everything? I never meant to drag them into anything. You could just show them. This bit, not the rest. Joe, I will never forgive myself for getting you shot. You didn’t deserve to be lied to or put in danger, and I wish I hadn’t been so weak. You guys just made me feel so at home, and like I could have some kind of family again, and I took advantage. Nicky -- Nicky, I know I can never apologize for getting Joe hurt. Not enough. I hope you’ll both be happy and well.”

The video ends and Nile snatches her phone back before the automatic replay can begin.

When no one says anything for much too long, Joe because he’s fighting tears, Nicky asks, “What happened to his _arms_?”

“He wouldn’t leave your apartment without your stupid cat,” Nile says, choked. 

Joe loses the fight with his tears.

###  **during**

Nearly two months after arriving in Sofia, Nile sees Meta Kozak having coffee three blocks from their apartment.

She nearly doesn’t register her.

Trying to be inconspicuous in Sofia is tricky, because so far, Nile is pretty convinced it’s one of the whitest places on earth. She’s changed her hair a couple times - mostly because Sébastien was really bad at it the first two times he helped her - and she only wears tracksuits in neutral colors out of the house.

She can’t get away with sunglasses in the middle of winter, so she tries to keep her head down while she shops for food. Sébastien said he’d make coq au vin, and given the way his eyebrows draw up skeptically every time she cooks, she’s looking forward to critiquing it. 

It’s kinda cute when he does it, she wants to see if it works for her.

She’s standing outside the shop, debating if she ought to get some flowers, just because (because it’s been nearly two months, and Sébastien kissed her so sweetly this morning, and also ate her out for a full hour last night), when she spots Kozak.

The information slides past her processing center at first, she’s still thinking too hard about whether roses are too much. When it hits, she has to restrain herself from bolting instantly. There’s nothing to say Kozak has seen her and she doesn’t want to attract attention.

She walks home slowly, taking a circuitous route, hoping no one is following her.

“Sébastien,” she says, almost evenly, as the door falls shut behind her. “Our cover is blown. My handler's in town.”

It only occurs to her later that the apartment might be bugged.

In the end, it hardly matters. It only takes Sébastien an hour to hack into Kozak’s email, to figure out it was Andy who sold them out, and in that time, Nile’s packed up everything they’ll need for the road. Strangely, it feels like the end of a vacation. She realizes, guiltily, that they haven’t even started to help all the people she’d hurt, and now she’ll probably get dragged right back in.

It’s a long drive from Sofia to Hamburg.

Somewhere in Poland, Booker wakes up from a nap that had him scrunched up against the window on the passenger’s side. He stretches awkwardly, as far as he can in the confines of the car. It continues to be surprising, to Nile, how a man as big as Booker can consistently make himself so small.

“You asked me how I can stand it,” Booker says, voice rough with sleep. “My family.”

Nile stares at the road, her eyes burning. “Yeah.” She wonders how he knows, that that was her first, traitorous thought - if she could get it all back, somehow, after all.

“I deserve it,” Booker says. “You think I didn’t try to go back? You think I didn’t try to get clean twenty times before it worked? You think I didn’t go crawling back each time and ask for love and forgiveness I didn’t deserve? I did.” He sits down heavily on the bed. “They gave it to me, every time, and I repaid them by bringing my problems into our home. I could have gotten them hurt, Nile. If I go back now, if I show them my ten year chip from narcotics anonymous and all the good I’ve ever done in my life, that won’t undo what I did. I would go back for me, to make myself feel better.”

Nile swallows.

They pass a mile marker – kilometer marker, really. Still a couple hundred to go before they even hit the German border.

“Isn’t it part of the twelve-step program?” She asks. “To make amends to people you’ve hurt?”

Booker laughs, and to her surprise, it’s a warm sound. “It is,” he says. “I talked about it with my sponsor, a lot. Making amends doesn’t necessarily mean forcing someone to let you into their lives again, not even just to apologize.”

“I would wonder, though,” Nile tells the steering wheel. “If I were them, Jean-Pierre and Michele. I’d want to know what happened to you.”

“I wouldn’t,” Booker says. “What would it do to them, to find out that I could get myself together, that I could be something better, just not when they needed me to?”

“Didn’t you do it for them?”

“Of course I did.” Nile can hear Booker’s smile on his voice. It’s like a balm on her soul. “Of course I started off wanting to be a better man for them, of course I dreamed of a time I could go home.”

“So what happened?”

He stretches again, back popping. “I got better. And I understood what a selfish man I am, and what a coward.”

 _You’re not,_ Nile wants to protest. _You’re one of the kindest people I’ve ever met._ “You’re not anymore,” she says instead.

“Maybe,” he allows. “But would it be anything other than selfishness, to draw government eyes on them just for my own peace of mind? To rub in their faces that everything they suffered because of me since then, I didn’t suffer with them? I don’t deserve their forgiveness, and I try to make amends in other ways.”

“Tell me about them?” She asks.

He’s silent for so long that Nile starts to think she jumped the gun, it’s too early and he doesn’t trust her. Why would he?

Another road sign flies by. Less than three hundred kilometers to Berlin.

“I do some stock trading, with the money I earn honestly,” he admits quietly. “Only what I make off of real art restoration, nothing illegal. I try to invest it in ETFs, things that will grow quickly without destroying the planet. Michele turns eighteen next year. I was going to invent some raffle he won so he can have the money for university. I make donations in their names, sometimes, too. Only in cash, untraceable, but for things they’d like. For Adele as well. Women’s shelters, animal rescues, that sort of thing. Jean-Pierre…he was five when I left. He loved penguins.”

The road blurs for a second, and Nile would blame it on her own exhaustion, but she nixed two cans of Red Bull when they crossed the border into Poland. She’s doing pretty well. No, that’s the tears, building hot in her eyes, because Booker – Sebastien – loves those kids so damn much but he knows nothing about them and never will.

“Don’t cry,” he says fiercely. Gently. “Not over this.” _It’s not yours to cry over_ , he doesn’t say. He doesn’t need to.

She takes a deep breath and doesn’t.

###  **before**

Nile waits, shivering, in the doorway.

All she has is the leather jacket her cover wore to the bar -- she wore to the bar, that is. She has one of Sébastien’s button-up shirts on underneath, tied in a knot at her waist. It’s the kind of casual, sexy thing she imagines a real college girl who just hooked up would wear to meet her hook-up’s neighbours for pizza.

Sébastien’s still putting on his shoes inside the house.

“We’ll see you for the game on Thursday?” Joe asks, yawning. Nile has rarely met someone so cool who is also so old at heart.

“Yeah,” Sébastien says, and God, he’s a shit liar.

Joe doesn’t seem to notice the Sébastien can’t meet his eyes or keep his twitching fingers still, just smiles warmly. “It was lovely to meet you, Nile,” he says.

“You too,” she tells him and means it.

“I’m sorry,” she tells Sébastien when they’re back at his apartment. “That you had to lie to them.”

Sébastien tries to smile, but the corners of his mouth turn down instead. “Me too,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, I hope you enjoyed, uh, (checks notes), Booker feels the chapter? ngl this was the chapter I almost cried writing so I hope you like it too.
> 
> btw, the BND is the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the main German intelligence organisation.


	10. epilogue I - lavender oil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: This is a purely Nile and Booker chapter. I know some readers have been skipping their bits and just reading the Joe/Nicky bits - those will be next time)

### two years later

“Hey,” Nile says, the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder while she holds up different shirts in the mirror. 

“Hi, honey,” her mom says. “How are you doing?”

“Good, good,” Nile says. The blue shirt is out. Green might be good. “Just handed in my last paper for the semester. And you?”

“Oh, you know. Pauline’s driving me crazy.”

“You could just stop talking to her,” Nile suggests idly, as she has done every time she’s talked to her mom in the last five years or so.

“She’s my sister,” Nile’s mom points out.

“In law,” Nile points out back. “I don’t talk to Aunt Pauline.”

“She’s so lonely,” Nile’s mom argues. “And I’m all alone now, too.”

“Ma--”

“Oh, let’s not fight about her,” Nile’s mom says, and Nile sighs. “Why are you calling?”

“Just wanted to check that the first week of August is alright for me to come visit.”

“Of course! Are you sure you only want to stay a week, baby?”

Nile drops her choice of shirt on her bed. “Yeah, ma,” she says, “I can’t stay away from work for too long.”

It’s true; she has a part-time job at Joe’s little art school, teaching afternoon classes and manning the phone when he’s not around, and she wouldn’t want to leave Joe in the lurch while she’s away for a whole month or something.

Joe wouldn’t mind, of course. Joe is literally the nicest person on the planet. Nile would know, because when she apologized for getting him shot for the first time, he frowned and spent about ten minutes lecturing her that it wasn’t her fault.

Nile would probably mind, though.

She tried, right after everything, to go home.

Sébastien had been in Marseille, in prison; she had barely known Joe and Nicky and Quynh and Andy back then. She’d had to go back to be officially discharged anyway. So, she flew home to Chicago and she moved back into her old bedroom at her mom’s house. 

It was awful.

Not because her mama doesn’t love her, not because she can’t forgive what Nile did, just because none of them can forget. There were just too many awkward silences, too many half-begun discussions that Nile had to end because she didn’t want to get her mom in trouble for knowing too much, or her mom had to end because she was crying.

Indus wouldn’t talk to Nile about anything except the extended Marvel Cinematic Universe.

After two months of long distance phone calls with Andy, trying to sort out some way for Nile to trace the families of everyone she’d put away before Sébastien, Nile’s heart and her phone bill couldn’t take it anymore.

Getting a place to study PPE in London was just an added bonus. She’d always thought, if she did study anything, it would be art. When she’d started poking through the UCL homepage, though, she’d known she wouldn’t be satisfied with that. Art was joy, art was fun. It isn’t what she wanted to do with her life.

So here she is, living in a tiny studio apartment Quynh owns above the three-bedroom she and Andy share now that they’re back in London for good after Quynh’s sabbatical.

She calls her mom once a week on Saturdays, and she skypes Indy on Thursdays. They’ve branched out from films and TV to their work lives, so it’s progress. She sent him a long apology letter before she left Chicago for good. He never answered, but Skype was his suggestion.

It’s better than nothing.

Nile puts on the green shirt and checks her reflection in the mirror.

Yeah, that’ll do.

He’s seen her naked anyway.

His flight’s delayed by ten minutes. You’d think, hopping the English channel, no way you could be late, but Heathrow is as Heathrow does.

Sébastien’s scruffy.

He hasn’t shaved in days, clearly - he got like that, once, in Sofia, and he rubbed his scratchy chin over her bare shoulders and made her laugh. His last letter had been almost hesitant, words crossed out and repeated, and the text with his travel details had been sparse, but to see him here, in front of her, real--

He drops his duffel bag at her feet and wraps her up into a hug, spinning her around - a move he doubtlessly learned from Joe.

“I thought I told you not to wait for me,” he laughs into her hair.

She pulls away to grin up at him. “Turns out I don’t really like taking orders,” she says.  
“I know it’s presumptuous,” Nile says as she keys the door open, “and in retrospect, maybe I should have asked before, but--”

Sébastien presses her up against the door as it closes behind them and kisses her senseless. Nile’s not prone to exaggeration; she thinks she might have lost feeling in her toes by the end of it.

The hotel room is swanky. Nile’s been pretty good about not touching the money she has left over from the military, because it makes her feel awful to use it for anything besides her ongoing project to support the children of people she’d hunted and fund any charity she can find that works for government transparency. This is the only thing she’s made an exception for, and she made it because she feels like she owes Sébastien, too. He suffered for her choices, too.

Anyway, she chose this hotel room because the bed is about as wide as it is long and the bathtub is enormous. She even paid extra for the bath to be drawn before they got here. The scent of lavender is thick in the air, and the thought of what she wants to do - what she's planned to do with him - makes excitement coil in Nile's belly.

“I thought you might not have gotten a lot of luxury in the last two years,” she says coyly as she leads him into the bathroom.

Sébastien laughs. “No, prison is not big on the jacuzzis.”

“Well, relax,” Nile says, pulling the shirt she spent an hour choosing over her head. 

She grins at his expression.

She had forgotten how easy it is, to be bold with him.

She had forgotten how much she likes to surprise him.

He groans when he sinks into the bathwater. He’s thinner than he was, the last time she saw him naked (in Sofia, the night before everything changed).

She slides in behind him, shivering as her back acclimatizes to the cold porcelain behind her and the warm man in front. “Would you like to talk about it?” She asks.

Sébastien sighs and leans back against her. “What is there to tell?” He asks. “I am lucky. I am lucky there is a statute of limitations on many of my crimes. I am lucky the French state protects informants. I am lucky I could help the police solve some outstanding cases. I am lucky my sentence was reduced. I am lucky Adele didn’t murder me on sight.”

Nile laughs. She would be jealous, she thinks, if he weren’t so pliant against her. “How was it, with her? With your sons?”

“Did you not get my letters?”

Of course she did. He sent them like a clockwork, once a month.

“Did you not get mine?”

She catches his smile before he turns his head away. 

“Reading your letters, and writing like mine, felt like being in Sofia,” she says. “Like a moment out of time.”

“And now I’m here.”

“Now you’re here,” she agrees. 

“Did you do this, get this room, to stay out of time?”

She sighs and wraps her arm around his waist, so he’s pressed closer to her in the sweet-smelling water. “I just wanted a night, with you, before we re-enter it.”

“Together?”

“If that’s what you want.”

He lifts her hand to his lips and kisses it.

“I’m divorced, now,” he says. “In case you were wondering. Adele’s remarried.”

“You didn’t make her a bigamist, did you?” Nile asks. That would be awful. She would have probably wanted to murder him on sight, too.

“No,” he says. “But it was a close thing. I think she hates me for that more than for the rest, actually.”

“And your sons?”

He sighs. “It will be a process. Michele remembers me, at least. He was glad of the funds for university. He may even visit.”

“What about Jean-Pierre?”

Sébastien’s fingers drum against the rim of the tub. “He calls himself JP, now,” he says, confused and forlorn. “He doesn’t remember me at all and he hates me for it. Which is fine. Adele agreed to let me call him once a month and try.”

“Did you tell them about the donations?”

“What good would that do?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Your family?”

She shrugs. “Like you said. A process.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

They’re quiet for a while.

“I should have put on music,” she says.

He shakes his head, his wet hair trailing across her shoulder. “I like this,” he says. “You.”

She kisses his cheek, trails her hand across his skin. 

“I like you, too.”

He leans his head back further, till it’s resting against her shoulder and she can lean over him to kiss him properly.

His skin is smooth under her fingers, whatever bath oil the hotel used making her touch glide and slip. She turns the water on, lets a jet of heat enter the tub, and he hisses in surprise before groaning in pleasure.

Almost by accident, her finger find his cock.

It’s half-hard, obscured by bubbles.

“Hmm,” she hums, pleased. “Someone’s excited.”

“I am naked, in a bathtub, with a woman I-- with a very beautiful woman,” he says, breathless as she begins to stroke him.

She smiles into her shoulder, and then bites, because she can. “With a woman you what, Sébastien?”

He gasps wordlessly as she speeds up her hand. It’s not like using lube for a handjob; underwater, it doesn’t go tacky. The bath oil keeps the water soft, keeps her hand gliding steadily, slipping over the head of his cock again and again.

“That’s so good,” he says mindlessly, head lolling heavier against her shoulder. “So good.”

She pulls her hand away. “A woman you what?”

He blinks up at her, eyes hazy with the heat and steam of the bathroom, with pleasure. Nile shuts off the tap.

“A woman I love,” he says, looking at her like -- 

Looking at her like he trusts her to keep his secrets and hold his heart.

She kisses him again, deeply, messily, angle awkward now he’s slipped lower in her hold, and resumes stroking him off.

“I won’t last,” he whispers, loud in the stillness of the room. “It’s been so long.”

“So long?” She asks. “So long since what?”

“So long since I was touched,” he sighs, lifting his hips towards her hand. Water slops over the side of the tub. “So long since I was held.”

Her lower back aches at the angle. He’s so much taller than her that she can barely reach him, but she keeps going. “Good,” she murmurs into his ear. “I want you to come. I want you to feel good. I want to take care of you.”

She closes her fist tighter around the head of his cock and he whimpers in her arms.

“Why?” he gasps out.

“Because I love you,” she tells him, and he comes, hips arching up just far enough that she can see it jet out of the water before he sinks back against her.

“Sorry,” he sighs. “I must be crushing you.”

She kisses the top of his head. “You’re just fine,” she tells him, and it’s a lie because he is crushing her, but it’s also the truth.

Later, much later, when he’s taken care of her in turn, when they’re lying beneath the single blanket on the enormous bed, he asks her if she regrets it.

She sighs and turns toward him, pillowing her head on his broad shoulder. “I regret a lot of things I’ve done. You’re not one of them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my google research tells me that there's a ten year statute of limitations in France for a lot of the crimes Booker committed. That, combined with Booker turning informant on his past associates, I imagined, would drastically reduce his sentence down to about eighteen months after about six months of trial/proceedings etc. Not a clue if this is at all accurate, but it's my story, so. In real life, you probably can't just leave the country immediately after being released from prison, but again. My story.
> 
> Adele does not forgive him, btw, and probably never will, but she can accept him wanting to support his sons and it does explain all the random raffles she always seemed to win just when things were getting tight in the last ten years. (she has complicated feelings about it all, having lost her brother to addiction and having to live with the knowledge that her brother got her husband into it; she's a teetotaler by now because addictive personalities run in the family and she doesn't want to do that to her kids. She understands that phase of Booker's life better than maybe anyone else, but she can't forgive it). (she has a great second husband.)
> 
> PPE is the acronym for the combined subjects Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
> 
> We're closing in on the end here and I am very excited. I will probably post it tomorrow. Ngl, I mostly write oneshots, fluff and smut, so this has been totally out of my wheelhouse and very exciting and challenging to write.


	11. epilogue II - mousse au chocolat

### two and a half years later

Humming, Nicky takes the ricotta and parmesan out of the fridge and the spinach out of the freezer. “This will be our secret,” he warns Salim. “Nonna does not approve of frozen vegetables.”

He defrosts the spinach in the microwave, wrings it out over the sink, and mixes the filling in a tupperware box. He needs the bowls for the rest.

“Okay, caro, it’s going to get a little loud soon,” he warns, pulling out the eggs and the cream and the chocolate that Joe insists on keeping in the fridge for some ungodly reason. Not that it matters, in this case. He sets the chocolate in a double boiler with the butter and gets to work on separating the eggs. Experience is a cruel teacher, and he knows now that he has to start with the egg whites unless he wants to clean every bowl and mixing implement he owns for absolute ages for fear they will contaminate the egg whites and make them unmixable.

“Bam!” Salim yells from his high chair when Nicky cracks the first egg with the knife. 

“Bam,” Nicky agrees. “We’re doing this the old-fashioned way, I don’t care how many videos Nile shows me of people doing this with a plastic bottle, that’s just silly.” He lifts off the top of the egg shell over the bowl, letting the egg white slop over the side before carefully sliding the yolk from one half of the shell into the other until he’s gotten as much of the white out as he thinks he can manage. “Alright, Salim,” he says. “One down, fifteen to go.”

He shuts the kitchen door before he starts whipping the eggwhites, but it’s too much to hope that Salim won’t complain about the noise eventually. Nicky’s very, very glad they splurged on a KitchenAid when they moved in so he can pick Salim up and rock him back and forth while the machine does its thing.

“I know, patatino,” he hushes. “I know. It’s so loud! But it will be so tasty, and as a treat, since you’re helping me cook today, you can even try a spoon or two.”

“I thought we weren’t giving him chocolate,” Joe yawns, stumbling through the kitchen door. He opens his arms, and Nicky hands Salim over, pressing a kiss to Joe’s mouth before heading back to his egg whites.

“We’re not,” Nicky agrees. “But he’s over a year, and google says babies can have chocolate after a year. Anyway, he’s not that fussy.”

“No you aren’t,” Joe says to Salim. “You are a very good baby.”

“Barely even a baby anymore,” Nicky points out, stopping the KitchenAid and lifting up the bowl of egg whites to see if they’re stiff enough to hold over his head.

Joe pouts. “Don’t make me sad. Do you need help?”

Before Nicky can answer, they’re interrupted by the flush of the upstairs toilet and quiet footsteps on the stairs. “Babas?” 

Joe’s eyes meet Nicky’s for a long moment, and Nicky almost thinks they’ll both start crying, because it’s so new, that she calls them that. “In here, Saadiya,” Joe calls.

Saadiya trails into the kitchen in her long nightie. “Salim wasn’t in his crib,” she says.

“He was here with me,” Nicky says. “We woke up early, and I decided to start cooking.”

She nods seriously. She’s so small that it would be funny, almost, if she hadn’t spent her first two months with them sleeping on a mattress on the floor in Salim’s room because she was so scared they would take him away. 

When they had gotten the call a year ago, to ask if they would consider fostering more than one child, they hadn’t known that Saadiya had been listening, that she had been made aware that she and her baby brother would most likely be separated barely a few days after they had lost their parents. Ever since, Nicky has regretted the moment they took to consider, to wonder where they would put a second child. They had more than enough space, but they had been prepared for an infant but not for a three-year-old, so that that first night, Saadiya had slept on the fold-out bed in Salim’s room and not on her own mattress.

The adoption finally went through two months ago, and he likes to think she trusts them now.

They’ll never know if Salim and Saadiya’s biological parents would be happy, that Joe and Nicky are raising their children, but Nicky hopes they would be. He didn’t know he had it in him, until that first night when he and Joe stayed away, lying on the floor next to Saadiya. He didn’t know he could love two people so much his whole being was filled with aching tenderness just watching them sleep. He should have known, Joe likes to say, because he has so much love to give. It’s all Joe’s influence, Nicky likes to say.

Their children will be loved. 

Today, more than ever.

“So, fiorellino, are you ready for the day?” Nicky asks Saadiya.

She nods intently as Joe sets Salim back into his high chair and lifts her up to sit on one of the bar stools by their kitchen island. “Papà,” she asks. “Could I...wear the dress?”

There is only one dress she could be referring to.

Nicky sneaks a smile at Joe. “I think today would be a good day to wear the dress, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Joe nods seriously. “Yes, I agree with Papà. Today is the day for the dress.”

They’ve taken the kids clothes shopping several times in the last year, because they grow out of everything all of the time. Two trips ago, they got the dress. They had really been there for pants and socks, but Saadiya had caught sight of the dress in the window and stared at it the whole time they were there.

It’s green, with a swarm of blue butterflies at the hem that lessens towards the top, and a blue sash around the middle.

The store had only had one two sizes too big, and after a whispered conference in the changing room, Nicky had taken the kids for ice cream while Joe doubled back and secretly bought the dress for Saadiya’s birthday.

She hasn’t worn it yet, because there hasn’t been an occasion special enough to warrant it and she wanted to save it.

“Maybe we’ll wait to change until this evening, though,” Nicky adds hastily, because there will be a lot of cooking today. 

Saadiya nods intently.

“Right,” Joe says. “Well, while Papà’s working on dinner, how about I start breakfast?”

“Orange juice, please,” Saadiya demands imperiously.

“Juice,” Salim agrees, banging his chunky little fist against his chair. “Juice! Juice!”

While Nicky whips the cream in a second bowl and checks that his chocolate is melting and not burning, Joe pours the juice and sets about making porridge, one of the few breakfast foods all four of them agree on. By the time he’s arranging it all in four bowls with walnuts and dried cranberries and carrying them out to the dining room, Nicky’s got the egg yolks whipped creamy with sugar and the chocolate added in 

“I’ll be right there,” he says, and then isn’t, because it always takes so much longer to carefully fold in the eggwhites and whipped cream than seems likely.

“All good?” Joe asks when Nicky comes out the kitchen licking chocolate off the side of his hand.

Joe’s porridge is forgotten on the table as he feeds Salim. There are gloopy drips of porridge all over Salim’s bib already and Nicky is guiltily pleased he’s on cooking duty all day and not on making-the-kids-less-sticky duty.

By afternoon, Nicky’s got the bruschetta resting in the cupboard on top of the plates so the kids and the cat can’t get at it, the chocolate mousse cooling in the fridge and taking up way too much space, the pasta dough resting alongside its filling and the pesto is made.

Joe’s gotten Saadiya utterly focused on designing placecards for each of their guests - he wrote the names, she does the drawing. One of the perks of parenting with an art teacher is that at least one of them has a never-ending supply of things to occupy children with, even if Joe is more used to older kids.

Salim is napping in his crib when Andy and Quynh arrive.

“We brought crackers,” Andy calls from the doorway, effectively waking him up. “And olives. That’s what Italians eat, right?”

“Andy,” Quynh chastises.

“No, no, she’s right,” Nicky calls back, picking the sleepy, anguished baby up and shushing him so his Baba, who is also napping in the rocking chair by the crib, can stay asleep for a few more minutes.

When they moved back to London two years ago and bought this house from the frankly embarrassing amount of money the American government granted them to avoid a very public and very embarrassing lawsuit Joe hadn’t even been considering pursuing, they had talked about it for a very long time.

“I’d like to branch out,” Joe had admitted at the time. “I love teaching, but I might go insane if I stay in the public school system.”

Nicky, who had known this for at least a year, had helped him by finding a house in London with a three-room add-on Joe could convert into his own little art school.

“And we’re sure about London,” he’d asked.

It had taken them a while to be sure. On the one hand, they both knew the city and loved it, and Nicky had been offered a tenure-track position at Kings’ College. 

On the other, Quynh and Andy lived in London and would be inescapable. 

After the first shock had passed, after Joe and Nicky had put all of their things in storage and moved themselves and their poor, traumatised cat into an apartment that rented on a by-the-month basis, they had sat down together and considered, in great detail, whether they should still see Quynh and Andy.

It had been Joe who had started the conversation, which had been a surprise - of the two of them, only Nicky had ever successfully cut anyone from his life.

“And you know how that turned out,” Nicky pointed out. “Elena’s threatened to fly in again just to make sure you’re alright.”

Joe had sighed. “Andy just -- lied to us so much, hayati.”

“She lied to Quynh as well.”

“And Quynh’s alright with that?”

“Quynh understands.”

“So you’re saying I should understand, too?” Joe had asked, furious. He was irritated a lot of the time, then, mostly because he was in pain a lot of the time. 

“No,” Nicky had said. “I just don’t want you to lose them because Andy made bad decisions.”

They had circled back to the discussion several times, but in the end, neither of them could stomach the thought of cutting their oldest friends out of their lives, and London it was.

To her credit, Andy has been there every step of the way. She helped them move; she helped Joe paint the walls of his art school; she babysat Salim when they had to take Saadiya to the hospital, despite being the least maternal person Nicky knows.

She even apologized, which is more than Nicky expected from her. 

“You can put the olives on the coffee table,” he tells her when he gets downstairs. Quynh is instantly distracted by Salim. For all she would balk at the mention of having children of her own, she has proved a worthy godmother to him in that she spoils him rotten. 

Nicky hands him off without protest. He’ll have to get used to it - there will be so many people in this house, today, and most of them will want to hold Salim. Nicky understands, it’s the best feeling in the world, to hold his little boy in his arms and to smell the top of his head and feel his sleepy little arms stretch and grab at you.

“Wow,” Andy says, looking around. “That’s a lot of chairs.”

“It’s a lot of guests,” Nicky points out. 

“You brought this upon yourself,” Andy says with absolutely no sympathy.

Nicky shrugs. “I, unlike you, have no problems admitting that I am thrilled to see all my loved ones in one room. I didn’t get that for the wedding, so I might as well get it for the anniversary.”

Andy gives him a quicksilver smile and starts unloading her bag of finger food on the coffee table. 

Cringing internally, Nicky gets out the nice serving platters.

Andy rolls her eyes. “Alright,” she says. “Fine. I will plate these tortilla chips, but only because you promised you’d cook dessert tonight.”

“I did,” Nicky assures her. “It’s in the fridge.”

“So you say. Where’s my goddaughter, anyway?”

There’s a giggle from below the dining room table.

One of the most infuriating things about parenting with an art teacher is that he takes children very seriously, all of the time, and he takes art very seriously. Under the dining room table is apparently a good space for creativity. They even have a little lamp there.

“How are those placecards coming along, fiorellino?” Nicky asks.

There’s a scramble under the table, and then she runs out, a stack of paper gripped tight in her hand. Someone is still going to have to have to fold all of these, and he hasn’t even started thinking about a seating arrangement. His mother cannot be seated next to Andy. Or Maryam. Or Joe’s mother, come to that. Maybe Nile would fling herself on that sword.

Nicky sits down on the couch and Saadiya cuddles into his side. She’s still in her nightgown, and she probably hasn’t even brushed her teeth yet today. He’s not winning any parenting awards.

“This is lovely, patatina,” he tells her, leafing through the placecards. Many flowers, and quite a few butterflies. She’s only four, though, and he thinks that being able to recognize what it is she’s drawn is already a massive success. She’s even stuck to the borders of the cards Joe gave her quite well, Nicky can still see all the names. He lifts her onto his lap to kiss the top of her head. “Well done,” he tells her.

“Where’s Nile?” Saadiya asks, craning her neck up to look at him.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe auntie Andy knows.”

Auntie Andy cringes at the name, but smiles involuntarily at her goddaughter. “Nile is on her way. Why don’t we go get cleaned up while your Papà works on dinner?”

Saadiya squirms in Nicky’s lap. “Can I show her the dress?” She whispers.

Nicky nods. “I think it’s time.”

He nearly doesn’t manage to make the rest of dinner on time. It reminds him of standing in the tiny, cramped kitchen of his first apartment, trying frantically to make gnocchi for the first time in his life. He just always forgets how long making individual ravioli by hand actually takes, and with so many people coming for dinner, there are many, many ravioli to make. He is incredibly thankful they have a pasta machine that at least rolls the dough out for him.

Nile and Booker arrive just in time to take over rolling and cutting the dough so he can start cutting steak strips.

“Sorry we’re late,” Nile says. “Where is everyone?”

“Joe was on childcare duty,” he says. “I think he’s still asleep. Quynh’s got Salim, and Andy’s helping Saadiya get dressed.”

“Sorry,” Booker reiterates. “It’s my fault, it was my day to call JP. We thought we’d leave earlier, but--”

“He talked to you?”

Booker’s smile is a shadow of a thing. “Yes,” he says. “Just for a bit.”

“I’m happy for you,” Nicky says, and he is.

For a very long time, Nicky had been unutterably angry at Booker. Sometimes, when Joe gets too cold and rubs at his shoulder, frowning, he still is. Nile, he had forgiven for her heartfelt apologies and earnest heartbreak over her own actions. Andy, he had forgiven because he understood her too well.

Booker hadn’t been there to forgive, and at first, Nicky had thought, good riddance.

Then Joe had started writing to him, and Nicky had gotten so deeply and harshly angry he’d had to go and take a long walk to figure out why.

Eventually, he’d realized that with Booker in prison, he’d been thinking of him as if he were still dead, someone to be mourned and pitied.

Booker was neither.

When he’d shown up behind Nile on their doorstep six months ago, Nicky had nearly punched him all over again. The only thing that had stopped him had been the baby on his arm.

Then, he had nearly told them both to get out and never come back. The last thing their children needed was an unstable influence like Booker’s in their lives, and if Nile was going to keep him around, well--

But Joe spent a lot of time with Nile, and Joe told Nicky he trusted her, and Nicky trusted Joe, so Booker came back into their lives.

So far, he hasn’t let them down again.

In fact, he’s been very honest about his past, which Nicky appreciates. And very honest about his present and his attempts to make amends with his old family, and his new.

Nicky understands on a molecular level why a child would make the choice to refuse their parent contact. He’s done that, and he doesn’t regret it, even if he regrets some of the consequences. At the same time, the very thought of Salim refusing to speak to him for months on end makes Nicky’s stomach clench.

He clasps Booker’s shoulder on his way to the fridge to get out the salad ingredients.

At some point, Joe wakes up again and takes over salad-chopping duty so Nicky can get showered and changed. Andy and Quynh are in very real danger of breaking half the living room furniture in the impromptu game of what appears to be full-contact hide and seek, so Nicky puts an end to that and takes the kids with him to get their party outfits on, because Andy apparently didn’t get very far on that front.

By six, they’re all, miraculously, dressed and ready, and dinner is practically done. 

Nile heats up the dip she brought and sets it on the coffee table in the midst of the chips, just in time for Aramis to emerge from his day-long nap behind the couch to jump right over the olives toward the siren scent of cream cheese and parmesan.

The doorbell rings, and Nicky nearly cries, because he has two small children and hasn’t slept properly in what feels like a million years, and he worked very hard on this evening and he can’t even stop the carnage because his arms are full of a four-year-old in a very pretty dress.

Joe runs for the door, and by the time Nicky looks back to the coffee table, Booker has caught Aramis.

“Don’t _do_ that,” Booker tells the cat. 

Aramis rubs his cheek against Booker’s, and then squirms so intensely Booker immediately lets him run away upstairs, away from the noise in the coat room.

Maryam and Ibrahim spill in first, sniffing the air excitedly. “Nicky,” Ibrahim says seriously, “I am so glad my brother married someone who can cook, it’s about time we had someone in the family.”

Nicky laughs, because Joe can cook, and Joe’s mother can cook, and Maryam’s alright, too - it’s just that none of them see the point in making pesto from scratch and Ibrahim is a fiend for it. 

He lets Saadiya down so she can say hello to her aunt and uncle, and turns to the door.

Elena and Enzo are coming in, followed by Joe, who’s got Salim on his arm and Nicolino holding his free hand, Joe’s parents are close behind, Zayneb cooing at Salim over Joe’s shoulder.

And finally, behind them--

“Ciao, mama,” Nicky says.

“Nicolò,” she says, standing in his doorway. “You cooked?”

“Yes,” he says. She hugs him, then, and kisses his cheek. 

“It smells wonderful,” she tells him.

The sudden pride at her words swells behind his eyes, ties his tongue until a little hand tugs at the bottom of his shirt.

“Would you like to meet your grandchildren?” Joe asks from beside Nicky, Saadiyah squeezing herself between their legs.

She shakes each child’s hand so seriously, so earnestly, that Nicky is for the first time in a hundred awkward Skype calls unambiguously, absolutely, definitely grateful she is in his life again.

When she hugs Joe, in turn, and kisses his cheek as well, Nicky is so overcome he has to go hide in the kitchen and finish preparing the bruschetta.

Joe finds him, plating up the toasted bread with tomato and garlic, ten minutes later. Neither of the kids are with him, which is no surprise. They are the guests of honor, at every party.

“Overshadowed by our own children on our anniversary,” Nicky jokes.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Joe says. “Are you alright, love?”

Nicky peers out the kitchen door.

Booker is holding Salim up as far as he can reach, making big googly eyes and pulling him close again. Elena and Maryam are chatting, holding glasses of sparkling wine, while Saadiya pulls Nicolino over to the table to show off her placecards. Quynh is following them to make sure nothing glass or porcelain ends up on the floor. Ibrahim is inspecting the TV and stereo system with his father, because he is about eighteen months and a second marriage away from becoming his father, while Andy tries to make them stop. Lucia and Zayneb are watching their grandchildren, nibbling at chips and olives. Nile offers them some dip to go with it, but her eyes are trained on Booker and the baby, soft and fond.

“I’m wonderful, Joe,” Nicky says.

THE END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the grand finale, this story returns to its roots: the Nicky cooking show.
> 
> I scoured several baby name sites in re the names, and Saadiya means (as far as I can tell) "lucky" or "flower", which is why Nicky calls her "fiorellino" - little flower in Italian. Thank you to the kind Italian friend on the discord server who helped me with that :D
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has been reading and commenting on this, it's meant a lot to me and I look forward greatly to hearing your thoughts on the end! Recipes will follow imminently.


	12. bonus: recipes

### Pancakes

**Ingredients:**  
2 cups flour  
2 tsp baking powder  
½ tsp salt  
2 tbsp sugar  
2 cups buttermilk  
2 eggs

So here’s a fun fact about the Europe/America pancake divide: they have very different ideas of what makes a pancake fluffy. I use both methods for extra fluff.

Basically, for pancakes, mix the dry ingredients and then add in the wet until you have a nice gloopy mix. Americans swear by buttermilk for a fluffy texture, and I agree - use buttermilk if you have it. If you decide you want pancakes but don’t want to go to the store just for buttermilk (idk about your household but everything else in this recipe is a staple in mine), you can mix regular milk with some white vinegar for a similar, if not as good, effect. You can also, if you want to be a little more health-conscious, substitute some bubble water for some of the milk - the carbonation causes fluff.

Now, what you would do in Germany is to separate the eggs before use, mix in the yolks and whip up the whites. Then, at the end, fold the whites in gently. Boom! Even more fluff. 

Fry in a hot pan with plenty of butter or oil.

Top however you want. My personal favorite is sour cream and maple syrup but I have been informed that’s weird. Americans go with whipped butter and syrup. Germans like powdered (confectioner’s) sugar, jam, nutella, fruit, you name it. 

There’s an Austrian variant to pancakes called Kaiserschmarrn, where you put rum raisins in the dough and then destroy the pancakes into little bits at the end of cooking and cover everything in oodles of powdered sugar, which is where the raisin thing comes from.

### Raclette

This ain’t a recipe, folks this is a loose collection of thoughts on the subject of raclette.

Raclette is one of Switzerland’s two cheese-based national specialties. Raclette is a type of somewhat soft, very smelly cheese. If you ever have the pleasure of going to a raclette/fondue restaurant, they have these massive cheese wheels that go around in a carousel of cheese so each wheel is under the oven for a bit, and then it comes out and the cooks scrape the melty cheese off the wheel onto your plate. I cannot overstate that there is a carousel of melty cheese waiting to go in your mouth.

Anyway, the home version of that is the home raclette oven, which is what you see in Germany more often. It’s like an open-sided oven that comes with little square pans and then you fill your pan with whatever you want, put it in the oven and get melty cheese and stuff. You can buy raclette cheese in most shops in pre-sliced packages, or from any cheese shop. The raclette ovens also have like a grill on top where you can fry stuff.

Traditionally, people eat raclette around the holidays - it’s a nice meal for family and friends because you can just sit around forever eating teeny tiny portions.

**Traditional sides to the cheese are:**  
Boiled potatoes  
Mushrooms (in German I would say “champignons” and apparently the most common translation is just “mushrooms”)  
Spring onions  
White bread  
Tomatoes  
Spices

The spices thing might be a holdover from Fondue, the other traditional Swiss cheese dish, for me, but I like to put herbs and spices on my cheese while it’s baking. They actually sell spice mixes just for raclette and fondue. A really classic match for cheese is nutmeg and pepper, but there are also some with dried garlic, oregano...whatever. I also put salt on because I am a deer and can be lured places with a well-placed salt lick.

**Other stuff I have seen people eat with raclette in increasing order of weirdness:**  
Ham or bacon, fried on the top of the oven  
Salami  
Bell peppers (I guess this isn’t weird I just don’t like it)  
Kidney beans  
Minced meat, fried on top  
Shrimp, fried on top  
Sweet corn

**Something that maybe only I and my friends eat with raclette**  
200g gorgonzola  
200g cream cheese  
Salt and pepper to taste  
A handful chopped chives or parsley

So raclette cheese has a very strong, distinctive taste, and it’s also very fatty. Sometimes you want something different. This recipe is also very fatty, but it also tastes excellent with potatoes, chives and mushrooms. 

If you have a raclette oven, you can pretty much melt any cheese with it, anyway, so the world is your oyster.

### Quiche

Oh boy, here we go on my hot quiche takes. Please don’t beat me up too much in the comments.

**The quiche they make in the story**

**Ingredients**  
1 roll of store-bought puff pastry  
450g frozen spinach  
40g pinenuts, roasted  
½ jar of sundried tomatoes, chopped  
200g feta, chopped  
3 eggs  
2 cloves garlic  
1 small onion, chopped  
A pinch of nutmeg  
Salt and pepper to taste  
Grated cheese

Preheat your oven to 180°C/375°F.

Put the puff pastry in a quiche form with a diameter of 28 cm (alternatively, any round tin will do, trim the edges).

Roast your pinenuts in a pan.

When they’re lightly browned, take them out and put some oil in your pan. Chop and fry the onion into small pieces, then add your spinach and press the garlic in. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg and leave on the heat until the spinach is fully defrosted. I’d recommend being liberal with your spices, spinach is very watery and needs salt.

Mix up your eggs with salt and pepper. Add in the chopped feta - I’d recommend small, even squares. You can also add cream, but watch out how much, because the firmness of the quiche is entirely dependent on the egg becoming firm. Don’t use milk, that will make it watery. Put in the pinenuts and the grated cheese (however much you want, really). 

Put your cooked spinach and sundried tomatoes in the dish on the puff pastry and pour the egg-chese-pinenut mix on top. If you wanna be fancy, you can cut open some cherry tomatoes and put them on top for decoration. 

Bake for 45 minutes.

Now, personally, I really like this recipe. It’s a pretty easy, the work is only in chopping stuff, so it’s something you can do on a weekday and eat for a couple days after. And I like puff pastry.

Booker does not think this is quiche, and this is kind of down to the pastry. In my book, if you’ve got an egg-and-cheese filling and a pastry side, that’s a quiche, yum. I am not much of a purist. 

The most classic of all classic quiches is French, so Booker is being kind of true to his roots in that he is being a pastry purist and also a dick (sorry, one of my favorite things about writing European TOG AUs is that they can have all of the dumb European infighting stereotypes people do have here, one of which is that everyone hates the French). 

**Anyway, here’s a classic Quiche Lorraine recipe to contrast**

**Ingredients**  
250g flour  
160g butter  
1 egg  
A few tablespoons of water  
A pinch of salt  
100g of thick-cut bacon  
1 leak  
4 eggs  
250ml cream  
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the flour in a bowl. Add in the egg and slice in the freezing cold butter and as much water as you need for the dough to hold together. Combine quickly to a dough that should just barely hold together. Wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for half an hour.

Chop up the leek, mix up the eggs, cream and salt and pepper. Fry the bacon in a pan so that it’s just a little seared.

Take out your dough, roll it out and lay it gently into your quiche form. My mom always had me stab it with a fork when I was little, apparently this is to stop the dough from making a dome. Blind bake it for a few minutes - put a sheet of baking paper and some dried cherry pits on top of the dough to keep it down and put it in the oven for a few minutes.

When it’s out, put the leek in the quiche form, pour the egg mix on top, and lay the bacon on the very top. Put it all back in the oven for 35 minutes.

Ngl, I’m not a huge fan of Quiche Lorraine, because leek is a sometimes food for me and there’s no cheese in it. My mom makes a really nice three-cheese quiche, which is all I want. 

So you can probably see where Booker’s coming from - this is a very different pastry, it doesn’t get those buttery layers puff pastry does. Of course, Quiche Lorraine isn’t vegetarian (and I would argue the bacon is the only thing that makes it worth eating but that’s just me).

Bottom line: If you’re busy and you want that eggy quiche texture, just skip the effort and use puff pastry. If you’ve got the time, give the proper quiche a try.

### Franzbrötchen

More pastry!

For this, you do need to make your own pastry, which is a royal pain, but it’s a somewhat different kind of pastry. You can use store-bought puff pastry, but the actual pastry isn’t really puff pastry.

And look, I don’t have the time or energy to explain this with actual measurements, I have made these by hand once and it is a huge pain. This recipe is pretty intense, but it’s good: [Franzbrötchen](http://mygerman.recipes/franzbrotchen-cinnamon-pastry-from-hamburg/). It’s basically copied from a German recipe, so it’s somewhat accurate.

The gist is, you can’t just make a yeast dough or a puff pastry - you need both. You make the yeast dough first, you let it rise, and then you roll out about 200g butter and do the book turns you see them do on baking shows. It’s tricky, because the butter needs to be cold enough to not melt into the dough, and your hands will always be too warm. It’s doable, though. 

When your dough is done, you roll it out to a big rectangle and cover it with liquid. People disagree on what liquid; the recipe I linked uses butter, some people use water, my favorite is orange juice or orange liquor. Then you put cinnamon sugar all over the top and roll it up. You cut off rolls like you would for cinnamon rolls, but then you squish the middle with a wooden spoon so it gets that classic squished look.

### Pink sauce

**Ingredients**  
A little butter  
Tomato paste  
Cream  
Salt  
Pepper

No measurements we die like men. Put the butter in a saucepan and let it melt. Squeeze a bunch of tomato paste on top. let it burble while you get the cream open. Pour cream on. Stir until dissolved, add salt and pepper to taste. My mom always uses dried veggie broth to salt, which is also nice. Keep tasting to get the right balance of tomato to cream. 

That it.

Serve on pasta with some grated cheese.

### Coq au vin

This was just a byline in the fic, but you know Booker takes his French cooking seriously. [This](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018529-coq-au-vin) is a decent recipe for it. My hot tip for you is you can also [make it with white wine](https://www.countryliving.com/food-drinks/a32042812/white-wine-coq-au-vin/) and either way you can use some of the sauce to boil rice/couscous as a side in which is incredibly tasty.

### Nile’s spinach and artichoke dip

I use [ this recipe](https://natashaskitchen.com/spinach-and-artichoke-dip-recipe/), because I like the jalapenos. Plenty of people don’t, there are a lot of alternatives out there. None of them are healthy. They are all delicious. Also, if there’s this much stuff in a recipe, I would argue it doesn’t reeeeally matter if you use parmesan. I’ve had good results using pretty much any old shredded cheese. Anyway I like this one because you can just make it in a pot and reheat as needed, as opposed to all the other ones they want you to make in an oven dish.

### Nicky’s final menu

**Finger food:** Chips and dip (and olives)

**Appetizer:** Bruschetta (see Chrysalis for this recipe)

**Main course:** Homemade spinach and ricotta ravioli with homemade pesto (see Chrysalis for recipe) and steak strips (without steak strips for vegetarians), salad on the side.

**Ingredients**

_For the dough:_  
250g flour  
2 fresh eggs  
1 tbsp olive oil  
3 tbsp water  
Pinch of salt

_For the filling_  
250g spinach  
1 clove garlic  
250g ricotta  
50g parmesan  
Salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste  
Optional: ~50g walnuts, toasted and finely chopped

_Dough_ : Put the flour in a bowl and make an indentation in the center, and add in all the wet ingredients. Combine the wet ingredients and then slowly knead in all the flour until it’s combined to a smooth dough. Let it rest for 30 minutes. The recipe says some weird stuff about having a hot bowl; some recipes say to put it in the fridge. Do what you like, it’s dough, it’ll be fine.

_Filling_ : Defrost the spinach (I know Lucia disapproves but I literally always use frozen spinach for everything it’s so easy. I also prefer frozen baby spinach because you don't get those stringy bits you have to find and eradicate) and mix it in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients. I really like using the walnuts because it adds a little crunchy texture, but ymmv.

Now the tricky part: assembly. Roll the dough out incredibly thin (one millimeter! one!). If you have a pasta machine, this is where you use it. Depending on how talented you are at shaping, you can do all sorts of fancy things with the dough now. I am very very bad at shaping, so I do what’s easiest. Just cut out the approximate shape of the pasta you want, put a dot of filling and close the dough over it. Make sure the edges are completely closed. If you can crimp, crimp. Use an egg wash or water to make sure the edges hold.

Boil hot water and put about ten ravioli in at a time. Lift them out with a slotted spoon.

Optional for non-vegetarians:

Slice about 500g of skirt steak into strips and fry for about one minute from each side.

Mix up ravioli with steak strips and pesto.

(This particular combination is my personal recipe, I don’t know if other people like this. There are some recipes online with peas added into this, which, no thank).

**Dessert** : Mousse au chocolat

Nicky makes an insane amount in this fic. I will give you a reasonable amount.

**Ingredients**

200g dark chocolate (<70% cocoa)  
3 eggs  
200ml heavy cream  
40g sugar  
50g butter

Separate the eggs. Beat the egg whites before you do anything else, they’re stupid easy to contaminate and honestly if you do the egg whites first you don’t have to clean all your implements properly before you move on to your cream, just rinse them in water quickly. Whip the cream next.

Melt the chocolate and butter slowly over a double boiler. I know double boilers are dumb and a pain, but it is honestly your best bet, if you do it directly on the heat it burns too fast and microwaves tend to make butter pop everywhere. 

Whip the egg yolks with 2 tbsp hot water until they’re creamy. I don’t want to assume people’s experience with homemade desserts, so creamy means: egg yolks, when whipped for long enough, get very very light and thick. It should look almost like custard. Add in the sugar to the egg yolks, then slowly pour in the hot, melted chocolate, mixing steadily. 

Fold in cream and egg whites. Fold slowly and never ever use an electric mixer for this bit, you don’t want to destroy all that air you whipped in. A trick I heard somewhere and don’t remember where is to put in a little bit of egg white at first and fold that in so the structure of the egg-chocolate mixture gets looser before you add in the rest.

Put the mousse in the fridge for at least two hours. It will keep for a day or two, but since there is raw egg in it, you can’t keep it for too long, and if you’re in America, you have to watch out, since American eggs are less safe to eat raw than European eggs. 

You can also chop some extra chocolate finely and fold that in for chocolate chips (don’t use real chocolate chips, they’re too big and very poor chocolate quality. This mousse is very intense, and not actually all that sweet. I like that about it. You can make it sweeter by using lighter chocolate. You can top it with fresh raspberries or mint leaves.

Full disclosure: Nicky’s menu here is what I cooked for my fiancee to propose. It worked for me.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I have been sitting on this sequel for a couple months now. It's not done by a long stretch, and it will not have the nice, regular update schedule that chrysalis did, but I still wanted to share it with you because it's the holiday season and my gift to myself is not hiding this fic and how much I love it away because I'm not as done as I would want to be yet.
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com).


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